Coiffeur

A live recording of James Brown was playing as I entered the local barbershop, or coiffeur, rather, in Narbonne, France. A relative of mine had recommended this particular coiffeur, and I had been in France for over a month by that time without my cheveux (hair) having seen the services of a professional. The coiffeur and I stumbled, just a little, as we communicated about what I wanted until I just said, “same as you.” He understood clearly and asked me to have a seat in his chair. He motioned to his sound system and said, “James Brown...?”, to which I voiced my official American Gen-X approval and had a seat.

My own mother was a hairdresser for a large part of her career, and as such, I have a soft spot in my heart for hairdressers, barbers, and coiffeurs. I have never complained if they didn’t get it quite right, and I always tip well. The way we treat service people, in general, such as wait staff, servers, flight attendants, and others, who can’t do anything back to us if we choose to be jerks to them, is an illuminating window into one’s personality. I give them my respect.

On this particular day, my only faux pas toward the coiffeur was my glaring lack of proficiency in the French language, but he was more than patient. I had heard the word coiffeur before, but it never really sank in as having a clear translation or definition. I was able to blunder out a few things he understood: “ma mère …was a… coiffeuse” and “J’ai vu James Brown dans les rues de Los Angeles, …when I was… vingt-deux ans.” (My mother was a hairdresser, and I saw James Brown on the street in Los Angeles once when I was about twenty-two.) My incompetence at français was and is resoundingly apparent. This remains a near-vertical learning trajectory for me.

Cultural expectations collapse fastest in mundane places, not grand adventures.

As the coiffeur, a Middle Eastern man, worked on my cheveux, I couldn’t help but notice the unique rhythmic pattern with which he operated. It was different from anything else I had encountered in all the places I have lived and traveled. It seemed like a choppy, staccato pattern at first, but it didn’t remain constant. His rhythm changed. After sitting there for a few minutes, it all made sense. My coiffeur cut and buzzed my hair in tempo with the music. I was getting a haircut paced to the cadence of James Brown’s band.

Cultural expectations collapse fastest in mundane places, not grand adventures. Here was a Middle Eastern/North African man in a small city in France, vibing to a continual live recording of a James Brown concert. I can’t make this up. This layered multicultural tapestry is nowhere near earth-shattering, but it dislodged my expectations for where I am.

Besides finding a James Brown-inspired coiffeur, there are quite a few things that one must bureaucratically navigate when attempting to integrate into life in France as a nomad or semi-permanent dweller. Here’s an incomplete list:

• The right visa and an apartment, house, or flat to live in

• A telephone number

• A bank account

• A general physician

• A neurologist, for us Parkinson’s combatants

• A gym, again, a Parkinson’s must-have

• A transportation solution, whether bus, train, taxi, or car

• A grocery store or market

• A driver’s license

• Language lessons, wise if you don’t parlez français

• The many mundane things like a boulangerie, a café, and of course …a coiffeur

I will address my adventures in accomplishing all of these tasks in a forthcoming dispatch. This was just one comparatively easy task among many more complex ones.

Sure, this was merely a haircut, but it turned out to be a multicultural narrative for me that I couldn’t have made up even at my best attempt at fiction. Every day that I do this, I am faced with a new experience, challenge, problem, and occasionally a dilemma, that keeps me entrenched in quelque chose de nouveau, or esprit du débutant, “Beginner’s Mind,” as I have mentioned in prior dispatches. There are routines that I gravitate to, but the macrocosm of this nomadic journey is one of unabated problem-solving and flux. Language incompetence forces humility! Neuroplasticity, anyone? This is not an intellectual leap, especially if you add the new-language component. See my dispatch “A Generous Helping of Neuroplasticity on Thanksgiving.”

When you choose to embrace every new experience like it’s something you’ve never seen before, and you purposefully withhold judgment, you are practicing Beginner’s Mind. It is a powerful mental posture that truly enables you to absorb and learn. When we bring our judgment along and try to force our observation or encounter against the backdrop of our idiosyncratic cultural or political bias, we don’t see things the way they simply are. We see them as a comparison to the way we think they should be. We all do this after we have made it through the formative years of our lives for the sake of pattern recognition- a critical survival skill.

Abandoning our pattern-recognition software would otherwise be suicidal, so it’s an awkward irony to embrace Beginner’s Mind, let alone make it a lifestyle, disregarding your own pattern recognition and withholding judgment for the sake of expanding your own personal breadth of understanding. There was absolutely no reason for me to be surprised by a Middle Eastern man grooving to James Brown as a coiffeur in this small town in France, but there I was, being surprised once again at what the world put in front of me. The nomadic life provides an opportunity-rich environment for Beginner’s Mind, no doubt.

This is increasingly poignant for those of us who are structuring our lives around holding back very real and ever-encroaching limitations, a leviathan that we can’t stop. There are some critical routines, habits, and patterns that we need to hold fast to, like our aggressive fitness habits, our clean food habits, our sleep patterns, our medication regimens, and our nurturing relationships, in order to slow the leviathan’s approach. But intellectually, we must flex with change, disrupt our patterns, explore the boundaries of our bias, embark on journeys that we are otherwise uncomfortable with, maybe learn a new language, …or even just find a new coiffeur in a new place.

This is the Nomadic Parkinson’s Dispatch.

A Generous Helping of Neuroplasticity on Thanksgiving

·

November 27, 2025

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow American relatives and friends! For Thanksgiving this year I am bringing a second helping of resilience in the form of neuroplasticity. So get yourself a paper plate (because I’m traveling light), and get to the table. Don’t make me keep calling for you, it’s ready now!

Beginner's Mind

·

October 29, 2025

In 1970 a master of Zen Buddhism by the name of Shunryu Suzuki introduced a concept that I have been wrestling with for the last decade or so. “Shoshin”, or “Beginner’s Mind” is an attitude or frame of mind that gives us the opportunity to dramatically alter our understanding of the world, our immediate environment, challenge, or task that stands before…