Razor
Sean Moore
You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young, I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.
What does it mean to be finely honed? Being sharp is important, sure, but it’s not enough. A hatchet can have a fine edge, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be found in the operating room. Precision, too, is key; the blade needs to go where you tell it to, every time, lest you leave some lasting knick in a place you didn’t intend.
But what does it mean to be finely honed? A blade only becomes sharp by being ground against a dull stone. Imagine that: two blunt objects colliding to make a fine point. Then to be honed is not merely a state, but a process: an act of little by little grinding away what’s of no use to produce an ever-sharpening point.
An ongoing process, at that, for the same action that has sharpened the tool – contact, with dull obstructions – now makes it dull once again. To be honed is this continual act, of sharpening the blade to fine edge, dulling as it’s made use of in the world, and returning to the grind stone anew.
In life, too, we are razors: we hone ourselves through what we learn and believe, we become dull as we discover how much else there is to know, and we return to our grindstones, determined to whittle away the little flecks of matter that have taken away our edge. We do so by colliding ourselves with what we know, and with what we don’t, in the hopes that through contact we shape ourselves into an ever finer point.
Naturally this can’t be done alone. Just as a blade isn’t sharpened to be left in a block, never to touch the roast, our sharpening must be brought into the world, lest we let our skills dull from disuse. And it is not merely enough to bring our sharpness out on display; feigning precision isn’t the goal. We must actively demonstrate our misuse of the tools we have cultivated.
Ignorance, hypocrisy, these aren’t traits to avoid. They are a necessity in order to grow, and learn, and become aware of what better things there are to be, and beliefs to believe. Without recognizing our ignorance, how could we learn what we did not yet have the insight to know? Without brandishing our hypocrisy, how can we overturn our once foolishly-held beliefs and turn to a better frame of mind?
Recognize that failures, missteps, faulty judgements, can be used as stepping stones to greater success. Our beliefs, ideas, thoughts, actions, must come into contacts with those of others’ so that our blunt instrument may serve us better.
We fear being seen as ignorant, our hypocritical, or foolish from our youth, or age. But where’s the harm in saying, “I hadn’t thought of that”, or “That’s something I didn’t know”? There’s no use fearing being wrong, and there’s no use avoiding wrong at the expense of silent ignorance or dissent.
The only thing worth fearing is that you’ve become the stone, rather than the blade.