You'd think by now I'd learned that everyone is human, that everyone has a flaw or a quirk or more than one. You'd think that by now I'd realize no one is perfect and that all those little crushes I get on people who I think are perfect, melt away after just a bit of time with them.
It's not like a crush crush. It's more like a crush where you find someone really interesting and you want to know them better so that maybe a little bit of their sparkle (false as it may be) might sprinkle on you just enough to make you shimmer on occasion.
I spent yesterday traveling to a conference with someone I once thought perfect. I knew, when I got into the car, she wasn't perfect. Lots has happened to make me realize that simple though really complex reality. The details aren't important, but for the 2 hour car ride to the conference and back, I kept thinking, "No one is perfect so get over it."
I wasn't disappointed to figure out this person wasn't perfect. I wasn't even angry. I was almost philosophical about it. She talked about her two marriages, her struggle with bipolar disorder, her decision to stop her medications after 20 years of being on them, her dabbling into bio-resonance therapy, her indecisions about her career, her posting on Match.Com to find someone who'll make her feel less lonely...none of it surprised me, but her original image in my mind crumbled a bit.
"She's a good person," I kept saying to myself. "She's wrestling with some of the same demons. She's fully human and not some mold of perfection without flaws or warts."
But she was, to use an old cliche, the straw that broke my camel's perfection back. "No one's perfect," I concluded and I could feel myself not only projecting that thought backwards in my memory, but forward as well. "I have never known and will never know anyone who is perfect."
There was no judgment, but there was this revelation: I need to stop trying to achieve it.
It's not like I wake up in the morning and say, "Okay, what am I going to do today to be perfect?" It's more like I have this full glass of "perfect" and every mistake I make causes it to dribble out. That's really the wrong metaphor because it implies that I see myself as perfect. Instead, the glass of perfection is outside of me and my job is to carry it every day from the starting line of the morning to the finish line of bedtime. It's impossible. It spills to varying degrees every moment. Some days I end up with an empty glass by noon and other days I can't even get out of bed dry having spilled the whole thing just by sitting up.
Still, for 48 years I've been operating under the assumption that some people DO end up with a full glass by the time they crawl into bed and what's even more amazing is that they do it for more than one day in a row. They do it for weeks at a time, even a lifetime.
Nope, everyone is as wet as I am...or they're dry because they don't even try to pick up the glass of water. They have actually banished that glass from their lives, which you'd think would make them perfect, but it doesn't.
This is where I thought my friend was -- she was smart enough NOT to pick up the glass of perfection, to shatter the myth that she had to have such a glass in her life. She was perfect in her desire not to desire "perfect."
So yesterday, as we careened down the freeway in her expensive and speedy BMW sports car, I listened to her stories and her struggles, her frustrations and meditations and I realized we were no different. Almost 15 years older, I expected her age to offer me wisdom, the kind of wisdom that would make carrying that glass of water a bit easier or perhaps a bit more successful. Instead, the only wisdom I got was that she's balancing her own glass (or perhaps glasses) along a similiarly bumpy road.
I'm not sure where this leaves me. Does it make me more forgiving of other's imperfections? Does it make me more forgiving of my own? Does it make the glass of perfection sitting in front of me any less enticing or alluring? Will I stop kicking myself for my mistakes?
I can't imagine that it will, but perhaps it will give me a pause, a measured rest long enough where I can breathe in deeply and say something soothing or tempered, something zippy or hilarious, something spiritual or earthy.
But it's like chasing my tail. I shall stop my pursuit of perfection by saying the perfect phrase to pull me from my pursuit perfection only to stumble on the words tipping my glass ass over tea kettle dousing myself in my own ocean of faults.
It's hard to stop kicking yourself when you have such well-developed muscles for it.
Atrophy. A-trophy. Which shall I choose?
1 comment:
Fargo8I believe with all my heart that the longing for perfection is the longing for control. The acceptance of imperfection, of the fact that we are all of us fallible, is the first of several steps of wisdom. It's a hard blow, because it implies the full acceptance of our parents' total right to their own fallibility. Without imperfection, there would be no great novels. There would be no exploration. There would be no relationships. The more Oprah preaches about the perfect diet and the perfect books and the perfect way to raise children and the perfect way to say yes and the perfect way to say no - the more we see her terror of falllibility. And her blessed fat is screaming out, "No! No! I am not perfect al all! Here I am, the voice crying out in the wilderness! You can not clean yourself enough or polish youself enough or get skinny enough or wisen up enough or read enough books or light enough candles or talk to enough smart people enough to ever become perfect! It just doesn't happen!"
Just the way you are. Waaaaay better than perfection. WAAAAAAAAAAAy way better. That's the place intimacy begins. When we can tolerate our own and our beloved's faults and odd ideas and moles and off-key voices and quirky sexual urges and lust for television and distrust of health-food people Kay's love of wine and the cosmetic floor of Nordstroms even though she reads AlGore and Proust and Susan Sontag. You. You. You. You You.
Yum.
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