ONE SIZE FITS ALL

July 3rd, 2019

The concept of one-size-fits-all surely fell out of a hole in someone’s head that also happened to be a portal to hell.  The concept is trying to take a butter knife to the clunky and inconvenient reality that in fact, only one size is being made.

We need only engage someone to open up about some peculiarity of pain or irritable temperament that they’ve discovered regarding their own body to know just how peculiarly different everyone is. The same is naturally true when it comes to size or shape. 

But the phrase “One size fits all.”  It has a certain ring to it.  There is something democratic about it.  Or fascist… (Though communism is clearly the political system of choice for such a concept)

While Aldous Huxley might be giggling in his grave over the concept of One Size Fits All, we can be sure that Orwell is equally tickled by the irony of ball caps built to fit every size head that say ‘Make Orwell Fiction Again.’

There lies a deeper interpretation that we can draw from this one-size-fits-all.  Just as the one-size-fits-all item never really fits anyone very well, there is something else, something big, that many people, indeed most, often find a similar problem, that is: reality.

How often do our ideas about reality fail to be true?  Or put another way.  How often does reality prove to be stubborn to the way we’d prefer it to be?  Like the one-size-fits-all shirt that doesn’t really fit too well, we are constantly faced with the fact that reality is very often not as we’d like nor what we think.

The change has to be in the other direction.  Whereas any of us can dispense with a poorly made one-size-fits-all T-shirt and make one by hand that fits us perfectly, it’s the other way with reality.  We have to change ourselves in order to fit reality.  A sort of Procrustes bed of sorts.  But the good thing is that the human mind, beyond almost all else that we can point a finger at seems to be the most well equipped to take on this challenge.

Indeed, one reality fits all of us, whether we like it or not.  But those who flourish will realize what virtue there is in making themselves conform more and more to the reality in which we all find ourselves.  Unlike a T-shirt that doesn’t fit well, there is no returning the reality we’ve been handed.

Best to see what shape we can take to better fit it.