As a recovering perfectionist, I’ve come to appreciate how little of life I have to improve, correct, or perfect.
And I’ve come to realize how I can stand in the way of perfection that already exists by my attempts to have life conform to my idea of what’s perfect.
Perfectionism is an attempt to control the details of my life so it doesn’t feel like it’s spinning out of my control. Unfortunately, all it ever provides for me is endless work.
Perfectionism isn’t great for anyone’s state of mind, because life seldom acknowledges our idea of what’s perfect. Life has its own ideas of what’s perfect, and I’ve come to see that life is a little better equipped than I am to make that call.
Those of us who have perfectionist tendencies are convinced that without our constant intercession and manipulation, our lives with either fall apart or be completely unsatisfactory. What if that just isn’t true? What if, by trying to enforce our idea of perfection, we’re missing something essential?
What if it’s already perfect as it is?
This is a question that occurred to me one day when I was trying to “fix” or “improve” something. It became blindingly clear to me the the thing I was trying to fix didn’t need fixing.
Suddenly, there was nothing for me to do but to deal with what was really in front of me, not what I thought should be in front of me. I didn’t feel any impulse to fix it, improve it, or complete it.
The “I’ve got to fix it!” narrative that had been running underneath my conscious awareness momentarily dissolved, and the perfection that had been there all along became visible to me.
The big surprise was how much easier life became for me when I was willing to see what was already perfect.
It wasn’t a question of lowering or abandoning standards, though when I was a card-carrying, “practicing perfectionist,” I didn’t believe that. It’s only a question of examining and expanding my conception of what might be best in any given situation, and my willingness to see beyond my own standards.
It’s funny how often perfection presents itself in a different costume than I expect to see.
Like most humans, I get caught up in the world of form. I often expect a thing, a process, or a result to look a certain way, and when it doesn’t look like the picture I have in my head, I get irritable.
Not coincidentally, irritability is the emotion most closely associated with perfectionism, because nothing is ever good enough as it is.
What’s just as funny is how easy it can become to see perfection where it already exists. But if you’re not willing to look for it, if you’re not willing to recognize it in a form other than the one you expect, how can you ever hope to see it?
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