I am lacking it these days. I have been stressed at work and home and it is showing. I seem to have a hair trigger this week and have lost my shit at home more times than I care to admit. Sigh...
A friend wrote this morning about working with God to remove our defects also required the willingness to give them up, while also allowing the idea of perfection to dissipate. Seems like a lot to ask. I have to give up practicing those most glaring deficiencies in my character AND give up the idea that perfection is an attainable goal? This makes me want to go back to bed.
Perfection is the thing that keeps me moving forward. I am not so arrogant that I think that I can attain it, well at least none of you will think so, but I do have moments where I believe that I have reached my own personal idea of perfection. And if I am honest, it erodes all belief that I have in happiness. This idea that if I just did this or didn’t do that, I would be closer to perfect. It is crap and I know it. So why so I stubbornly refuse to let it go?
Because for me, it is seductive as hell. I want to believe it, I need to believe it.
Well, it would appear that I like to be just a little off base. I like to inventory and see that I am not “there” yet. It keeps me motivated to do the work to move forward. It propels me into the next whatever the fuck I think is going to make me happy...and it works just enough for me to continue the fight.
What I realized this morning is that I might need to stop being such a forward moving being. That perhaps this desire to always be improving, moving more toward this idea of perfection, is exactly what makes me nuts and crazy. Perhaps this ridiculous standard that I hold myself to is actually what is keeping me stuck...Hmmmm.
I realized a long time ago that I didn’t know any perfect people and that if I were to come across one, I probably wouldn’t like them all that much because who wants to hang around a perfect person? Not me, while I am better at the comparison game, I am not cured and hanging with perfection would be a sure fire way to make me instantly miserable.
So if I don’t know ANY perfect people why do I persist in holding that out as a goal?
It would appear that I have this unwillingness to let myself off the hook even for a second. Unattainable goals, ridiculous pursuit of stuff that is not even real, constant comparison of myself against a standard that no one else on the planet can attain...seems like something someone might do if they didn’t like themselves very much.
Ouch.
Perhaps, instead, I could just work on some of my more glaring defects (anger) and I could endeavor to do it differently today. I could just work on taking this one thing that plagues me still and try to find some new way to do that better, leaving the much longer list of shit for another day and another time.
Perfection pursuit ruins the now. Robbing me of any kind of real satisfaction in this moment. Always eroding my peace of mind here and now so that I am never satisfied and always willing to get back on the treadmill and plod along instead of just enjoying the view right where I am. Each moment of my day may not be perfect, but how much am I really noticing the moments when I am all caught up in the ridiculous pursuit of perfection?
I can see that my commitment to perfection costs me my peace within. Perhaps I can start making a new commitment?
I don’t even know how that might look. I just know that it might begin by slowing down long enough for the moment I am in to matter more than what I think the moment should look like and then disparaging it because it doesn’t match this bizarre idea of perfection in my head.
Just another lesson for me in finding peace within requires that I give up all that I think that I know, commit to and demand. Life will bring me what I need and take what I don’t, and it never, ever requests my agreement or assent. Life just comes and delivers a shitshow or moment sublime and I can see that far too often I am all caught up in myself, missing the sublime because I am all embroiled in the shitshow.
And today I can see that there might be another way, and that way just might cost me my idea that if I just do it right, better, faster, harder that I will somehow be delivered to perfection’s shores. Today, maybe I can say fuck perfection and just be where I am as completely as I can...now. And maybe, just maybe, that might give me a little more peace within.
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