When I was 15 years old, my French Horn private teacher told me that no matter how good I became as a musician, there would always be someone else better. He also reminded me that I would also never be perfect. My teacher then told me about a time recently when during a concert, in the middle of a glorious piece of classical music, he — the principal horn player for the Cleveland Orchestra — had misplayed a note.
I was stunned. “How could you flub a note? You’re a professional.”
He responded: “No one is perfect. We play our best. We hope for the best.”
Well, at age 15, with hopes of becoming the next greatest French Horn player in the world, I didn’t like hearing those words. Why was I taking private lessons? Every teacher had told me that if I worked hard, I could be anything I wanted to be. I was in a high school with high standards and expectations. I didn’t quite know how to move forward if I couldn’t be perfect.
A few years after that conversation I was further shocked to discover this verse in the Bible:
“We all make many mistakes.” — James 3:2 (International Children’s Bible)
I believe that inside of each of us, no matter our personality type, lives an inner perfectionist. The inner perfectionist in each of us believes what our teachers told us: if it isn’t perfect, it’s not worth doing. So we work out, we diet, we try to organize every square inch of our house, we constantly search for the perfect job, the perfect spouse, the perfect weather, the perfect family.
In her Blog entitled, the Inner Perfectionist, Nikki Michelle Soo recently posted this testimonial from a young woman who shares what her inner perfectionist is saying to her:
“The craziest thing that my inner perfectionist says is that I must have my world and my belongings perfect. And well organized. So that when I die, no one will judge or criticize me for being imperfect or disorganized. I’m ruthlessly organizing my life — in preparation for when I die! How cray-cray is that?” — Nikki Michelle Soo
We need to admit that throughout our lives, we receive mixed messages about whether or not perfection is desirable or achievable.
Like former basketball legend, Wilt Chamberlain once stated:
“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.” ~ Wilt Chamberlain
I have a theory about why we strive for perfection:
I think it is because of the consumerism of our culture that we walk around feeling less than, invisible, imperfect, flawed. Here is why:
We have a culture that loves money. It drives us so hard, that we have an advertising industry that controls a lot of our emotions and our self-esteem. It is advertisers who, in their quest to sell us things, make us need things. Advertisers create a need in us — the need to have it all, to have a perfect life and be a perfect person, and then they offer to us, products that fulfill those needs. Now, is any of that even reasonable? NO? Is perfection attainable? Not in the least. But we spend our lives following trends, buying things and continuing to feel broken, flawed and imperfect, because we can’t possibly keep up with the latest of everything, no matter how much money we have.
It sounds crazy, but if we lived off the grid, and didn’t even know what other people were wearing, eating, watching, what their families looked like, how well their kids were doing, “supposedly,” we would not feel so misshapen and unacceptable.
How do we fix this? Well, it takes an attitude shift. If we can remove the “Igottahaveitall” advertising, consumerism filter, we might be able to relate to some of the philosophy and lifestyle choices found in the eastern countries. Let’s look at something that is very common in Japan. When a dish is broken, it is not thrown away, it is repaired, and it is repaired in a manner which actually celebrates the break.
It is called Kintsugi — the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. Rather than rejoin ceramic pieces with a camouflaged adhesive, the Kintsugi technique employs a special tree sap lacquer dusted with powered gold, silver or platinum. Once completed, the beautiful seams of gold glint in the obvious cracks of ceramic wares, giving a one-of-a-kind appearance to each repaired piece.
This method ends up celebrating each artifact’s unique history by emphasizing its fracture and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. In fact, Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with a new look and giving it a second life.
And while the art of Kintsugi is beautiful to look at and appreciate, it isn’t a technique that you or I can actually do. But there is something from the Japanese culture that we CAN actively embrace and incorporate into our lives, and it is called WABI-SABI.
Wabi-sabi is the view or thought of finding beauty in every aspect of imperfection in nature. It is about the aesthetic of things in existence, that are “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” Deeply influenced by Buddhist thinking, Wabi-sabi is a beautiful way to describe what is natural and pure and to acknowledge the beauty of any substance or being in its most natural and raw form. So, when many of us stopped wearing makeup during the pandemic, we went Wabi-sabi. Seriously, there is our western culture creeping in to this eastern thought. Our view of beauty relies upon the application of products to our face and hair, instead of the opportunity to accept that our un-madeup faces with flaws, and cracks, and imperfections could actually be beautiful. Just get me some gold and pour it in these laugh lines.
The concept of Wabi-sabi might better be understood if we look at the meaning of the root words themselves. WABI expresses the part of simplicity, impermanence, flaws and imperfection. On the contrary, SABI displays and expresses the effect that time has on a substance or any object. Together, WABI SABI embraces the aesthetic appreciation of aging, flaws, and the beauty of the effects of time and imperfections. They express simplicity and the truest form of an object. Finally, it embraces finding comfort in purity and a life detached from materialistic obsessions of the world.
One of the best places that we can easily infuse Wabi-sabi into our lives is in our Relationships. A Wabi-sabi relationship is one in which we deliberately accept each other where we are — imperfect, unfinished and mortal. This is the essential Wabi-sabi frame of mind. Appreciate the imperfections in others and in myself. Hmmmmmmm. That’s truly tough at times.
Those imperfections in others sometimes make us crazy….but they are also what make those people dear and unique to us. Besides, what would we do with a perfect friend or spouse?
Author Guy Harrison has written: “Perfection is overrated, boring. It’s the imperfections — the vulnerabilities, the weaknesses, the human elements — that make us who we are, that make us real, beautiful, and necessary.” ~ Guy Harrison
Let’s all stop trying to fix each other’s imperfections, and instead, try to simply enjoy each other. The perfectionist in us wants to control the flaws instead of letting things be.
Psychologist Carl Rogers wrote: “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” — Carl Rogers
Our culture has long been too consumed with perfection. Perfect records, perfect grades, perfect looks, perfect everything. We are not perfect, and we need to find the magnificent in the simplistic and the natural.
Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet — that our bodies, as well as the material world around us are always aging and transforming. Through Wabi-sari, we learn to embrace the passage of time as a normal occurrence and a cycle of nature.
When young children go for a walk, they pick up interesting things. Stones, feathers, pine cones. They are drawn to these treasures because they are unique in the world. They are miraculous treasures just the way they are. Let’s abandon perfect. And let’s start to see the fingerprints, the scars and the laugh lines as perfectly imperfect. And oh so beautiful. Just the way we are. Amen.
Author, professor, and philosopher Sam Keen has written: “We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” ~ Sam Keen
May we each try to do that…..in the coming days, let’s attempt to see each other as perfectly imperfect.
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