Polishing Turds

It’s good to polish ourselves and make ourselves sparkle. A shower feels good and clean. For women, putting on make-up is a way to brighten one’s outlook.

For both men and women, putting on nice clothes and tending to our appearance and presentation is a way to make us shine. It’s good to be clean and sparkle in body, appearance, and beyond that, in our thoughts and in our heart.

However, it’s not too difficult to overdo sparkling. We can spend too much time in front of the mirror, grooming.

We can spend too much time and money on clothes and how we look. We can spend too much money on status symbols that we think make us sparkle to others – cool computers, nice cars, sumptuous homes, and trophy spouses. We can spend too much time crafting brilliant ideas. I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens, a truly sparkling essayist, who wasted a great deal of talent and ink defending the indefensible invasion of Iraq by the US. We can even spend too much time generating a sparkling heart, as we do with the wonder of romantic love or desiring mystical experiences. Just as night follows day, an obsession with love and states of union with the beloved generates “Dark Nights of the Soul,” experiences of alienation, emptiness, and meaninglessness. These are very inspirational, if you like suffering and depression.

To get graphic about it, we can compare an overemphasis on purity to polishing turds. My dog Dayo produces high-quality examples on a regular basis, for all to see and smell, so we can use one of his for this example.

Suppose I were to find a nice specimen from Dayo that he would be willing to donate to a worthy cause. I decide that it is a bit dull. Since everything is sacred, why not make dog shit sparkle? So I take a metal polishing cloth and I begin to rub.

Many things in life are like this. Jewelry can make us sparkle:

  While self-improvement is important, we can waste time trying to perfect ourselves by polishing stuff that doesn’t need to be polished, shouldn’t be polished, and is in fact reduced in quality when we attempt to polish it. Drinking alcohol is often an attempt to polish our mood. Many people think they are more relaxed, comfortable, and happy when they drink. The sparkling effect of alcohol decreases with quantity until finally, our behavior descends into something that might even make a turd blush.  If we look at our lives from this perspective, we might find a lot of ways in which we are polishing turds, like eating gourmet food at expensive restaurants that makes us sparkle.

 One common way to polish turds is to spend a lot of time thinking about what to say in order to make other people like us. We humans often try to polish our words to make them sparkle instead of just being OK with ourselves. The result is an overdone, phony, plastic presentation that makes other people wonder what we are hiding. Are we afraid that they will see that we are really turds? The more we polish, the more likely we are to convince them that yes, since we clearly think we are turds that need polishing, they should treat us like turds.

Another common way is to hang out with people who have status or who make us laugh but who are basically directionless, like a ship without a rudder, or who are actively going in a different way than we are. We are making our life temporarily sparkle in the reflected glow of this beautiful, powerful, or talented person who, once you take a closer look is…something of a turd.

Political news is full of examples of self-polishing turds. They come with their own metal cleaning cloths and they rub around on them to make themselves sparkle. Unfortunately, the result rubs off on us, the consumers of their pronouncements and decisions.

You probably can think up other examples of turd polishing. If so, please let me know!

You might benefit from doing a turd polishing life inventory. What turds are you polishing in your life? Might there be a better use for your time and energy? Probably!