Habiliments - what are you wearing?

Habiliments: clothes characteristic of a particular occupation or profession. For example, the habiliments of a doctor, or a construction worker, or tennis player, or a teacher – except on casual Fridays. The habiliments would be switched into those of the common folk. But then what profession would the common folk have to have distinct habiliments? They would have the habiliments of life because life would be their occupation.

Yes, everyone’s main occupation is life. We have to work it and weave our way through it. Every once in a while or maybe all the time (for some or all), the weaving is done by divine substitution instead of our own handy work. They say you are what you eat, I say you live what you decide. Come to think of it, life is but a series of decisions, essentially. Once we let someone else take the wheel and make the decisions for us, we are not living our own lives, but theirs instead.

This is the perfect case with Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The witty Lord Henry is too influential for Dorian Gray, to the point where his paradoxes seem simultaneously foolish and true (that is, if you can find the truth in them). I won’t give out what happens. All I can say is that it’s a good read should you decide to read it when or if you have a chance.

Take-home message: live your own life and individualize it with your decisions . . . or clothes.