I brush my teeth at night for the same reason we all do. I'm hedging my bets, hoping my pearly whites don't fall out of my head before I die, when I won't need them anymore.
So I go to brush my teeth last night like I always do. Nothing special. I noted how tired I looked in the mirror, squeezed some paste out of the tube and started scrubbing my teeth. I just wanted to get back to bed and watch the end of Stephen Colbert before I went to sleep. It had been a long day.
I was completely on autopilot, my hand doing its' obligitory robotic circular motion, when I got this crazy thought...
"I'm actually cleaning something right now. My teeth."
Never occurred to me. Somehow I learned that circular scrubbing motion when I was a kid, labeled it "brushing my teeth" and never revisited the topic. For all these years I've used the same hand motions never actually trying to clean my teeth! I was just moving the brush around in my mouth like I learned.
In light of this fabulous new information, I decided last night to focus on the hand motions necessary to "clean my teeth".
It was literally an entirely different motion of my hand! Blew my mind.
What other things have I accepted as "the way it is" and never questioned again? I bet there's a ton. I'm on the hunt now.
Maybe it's the David Hockney book I'm reading on perspective right now that has me reanalyzing and looking everything differently. I don't know, but I can't remember a time when brushing my teeth blew my mind like that. Pretty cool :)