Deborah Lipp

Every night I wash my face: I rinse with warm water, then I lather up, rubbing my face with the foamy stuff, then I splash with water until I’ve rinsed off all the lather. Then one night, a few weeks ago, it occurred to me to do it differently: I lathered and rubbed, then splashed and rubbed some more, and did that a few times before completely rinsing off.

My face was much cleaner.

This completely blew my mind. I’ve been washing my face, which is, I think we can agree, kind of a basic function of living, the wrong way?

Now, I know you’re all going to launch into a grooming discussion in comments, but what fascinates me is how we learn imperfectly. We think we know how to do something that we were never taught per se, or taught perfunctorily, or only taught once. I’m trying to remember why I changed it a few weeks ago, and I think I had a visual memory of someone washing their face with the additional rubbing on TV. Until I accidentally accessed that memory, I had simply not learned. I thought I had learned, but I had not.

As someone responsible for one-on-one training of Pagans, this strikes a deep chord in me. It is my responsibility to train my students in my tradition of Wicca. And I do find, years later, that they’re doing some odd thing they shouldn’t be doing, some odd thing they failed to learn or I failed to teach.

But I feel like I’ve stumbled upon something about being human. We all learn imperfectly, all the time. We think we know how to do things, or that our jury-rigged version of how to do things is simply the way it’s done. I’m staggered by the imperfection of what we know and what we think we know.