Is Perfection Something We Should Pursue?
Orm Vs…The Norm
I come from a short family. I have a Mom who’s 4ft 9” and a Dad who was 5ft 2”. The fact that I made it to the dizzy heights of 5ft 6” is a small miracle.
As luck would have it I married into a family of giants. My wife is 5ft 9”, My father in law 6ft and my brother in law an impressive 6ft 6”.
Our wedding photos of the bride, groom, and close family looked eerily like a human Xylophone!
My height has never bothered me, and never stopped me from doing anything I wanted. It’s an imperfection that I’m more than comfortable with.
Imperfections are what set us apart, a fact that often seems lost on the people of Snapchat and Instagram.
Filters to enhance most of our features are the norm and there are countless tutorials on YouTube giving tips on makeup that completely change the participant’s natural look.
The use of cosmetics to enhance a feature or perhaps cover that irritating spot that appeared on the night of your first date is far from the world of contouring, applying primer to skins etc.
Imperfections are what make us stand out, stop us from being a procession of mannequins, uniform in both sizes and looks.
I’m sure most of us have delighted in plucking from the crowded foliage the much-coveted four-leaf clover. After all, no afternoon was ever filled picking three-leaf clovers.
An example of just one of natures wonderful imperfections.
So if there are beauty and serenity with imperfections, why do you and I strive for this hallowed flawless beacon?
We are driven to it, from parents cheering us on at school races, to teachers pushing their budding pianists to become the next Mozart. It drives us forward.
Perhaps those parents and teachers should consider the wise words of the great basketball player Michael Jordan.
Perfection is sought and strived for and yet so rarely achieved. The perfect game, an artists creation, or the most beautiful of sunsets.
There are numerous studies linking perfectionism with a higher mortality rate, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and anxiety.
Yet we still push perfection as the level to aspire to, a constant measurement that we will rarely live up to.
Perhaps we should relax a little, embrace the nuances and subtle variations that make us all different, enjoy that old battered cup with the chip in it that was created when your son dropped it making the worlds milkiest cup of tea.
The photo where you’ve been caught pulling that strange face that makes you cringe, then laugh every time you see it.
The bump on your head from the time you tried to climb the tallest tree in the field.
All these little things that if they were perfect would melt into the background of a thousand similar memories.
Go out and have some fun, don’t worry about getting everything right first time or it being the perfect day.
I’ll sit here with my chipped cup and think back to when all the keys on the xylophone were still with us and how that memory is etched into our wedding day.
