I might find a piece of
a shell, cleaned to shiny glimmer by tumbling in the surf or a sand dollar with
a corner missing, demonstrating its complexity by showing its innards or its
fragility with the tender shell shattered.
The desirableness of perfection and maybe in particular its
elusiveness was burned into my being, unquestioned. I thought it was the most normal belief – one shared by all
– and it, therefore, extended its tentacles from those beach visits into all
aspects of my life. Recognizing just how infrequently perfect is attainable, I
configured worth or value of all things (products, outcomes, people, myself)
accordingly.
Not perfect was
clearly not as valuable as perfect.
And imperfect could not become perfect. While this was supremely exacting and limiting in many ways,
it also liberated me from certain things, like pretty. I was not pretty, not perfect in that
pretty way, and I never would be.
Nor would I ever be expected to be. As a not perfect, not valuable person, I could construct
that barometer easily: not perfect equals not valuable and not pretty.
Knowing just how elusive it is, we self sabotage, we fall,
we make it worse by failing. There
isn’t anything redeemable about this agreement at all.
Sure, I have heard the TED talks on not-perfect and read
plenty of self help books and analyzed my life and its shortcomings, but here
it was, in living color as it were. But it wasn’t until I was back on the beach in my home town
watching my nephew pick out shells an rocks that I fully acknowledged this
perfect agreement and its history in my life.
My nephew was drawn to shapes, figures he saw in the broken and worn down
shells. I resisted the urge to dissuade him from collecting imperfect
shells. He found one heart shaped
piece and he immediately identified it as something he wanted to give his mom –
dead nearly a year at that point.
I stepped ever so slightly back from the ingrained belief
system. Nearly another year has
passed and I still struggle with the aftermath of perfect as I try to release
the compulsion to find perfect and to punish myself endlessly for not being
perfect. I remember, in flashes as
I walk the beach, that there is beauty in a broken shell, an imperfect sand
dollar. I identify rocks whose odd
coloration or shape evoke beauty, whose value and worth is simply in its
existence.
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