Well hello there.
This hat is not my usual headwear, and it has nothing to do with this video, but I was at the Toronto Argonauts Canadian football game tonight, where it was country day, and we all got this hat.
And I could make a video about how it’s fun to make- it’s fun to wear different hats, to try on different styles.
It brings out a different feeling to wear a different hat, and this is something that we can play with.
We have a certain identity that we’re used to, a certain way of clothing ourselves, and it’s easy to make that feel like it is part of our deep, our true selves, our inner nature, when a lot of it could just be the dressing on the outside.
Even the word “person”, from the word “persona” for a mask – the origin of person is mask – really suggesting how it is like a shell, a wrapping that we put on ourselves.
And by trying on different wrappings, different shells, we can really get some insight into what is really underneath.
If we see- if we identify what is it about ourselves that is attached to the shell, and what is it about ourselves that is something deeper, something inside the shell, something that doesn’t change no matter how we dress ourselves up.
My first reaction, the thought of wearing this: of course, at the game, in the stadium, there’s the hiding within the crowds, but on the way home, as the crowd dispersed, I was eventually the only person in the vicinity wearing this hat, and suddenly, from just being an attendee at a shared event, it became I am somebody who wears this kind of hat.
Which I have never imagined myself to be.
So I imagined, well, what would I be like? What would it mean if I were someone who wore such a hat? What would change? I’m still me.
It’s really only this shell layer of how I present myself, how I face the world, this persona, this mask, that would be altered.
And imagining this kind of country character, this kind of person who would say something like “It’s time to mosey on back to the ranch”- that phrase got stuck in my head as something that- I kind of like that.
Time to mosey on back to the ranch.
There’s something good about that.
There’s something that I like about this persona, although, clearly, this is not, you know, me.
This is not my- this is not some kind of, you know, ideal expression of my character, and it’s only a very small part of my character that wants to talk about moseying on back to the ranch.
I don’t really need to have a ranch.
I’m okay to not have a ranch.
But there is something about a certain kind of a country spirit that I think me as a city boy and so many of us can benefit from taking on some of that spirit.
And I think the same applies for any hat, for any persona.
We can learn something from this shell, from this surface layer, that then gives us a new insight about, well, if that changed, if that aspect changed by putting on a hat, if that part of me changed by putting on a hat, then how central is that to me? How much is that really critical? But the things that don’t change about who I am, that I could be putting on this country hat, or I could put on one of those newsie caps, or I could put on a beanie, or I could put on a beaver fur top hat, or I could put on a newspaper cone, or put on the tinfoil. What doesn’t change? So by changing our outside we can bring into relief and bring into the picture what isn’t changing.
So that is not what I planned to talk about.
I had a completely different topic.
And I just thought, why not talk about it while wearing this hat? But this hat was not able to be silent.
This hat was not able to simply be in the background.
This hat demanded to be talked about.
So this ended up being a video about this hat.
And now it is done.