The strive for perfection is in itself, a trek that most, I feel, choose to willingly take in life. I was myself a strong perfectionist, in the sense that I would feel an utter sense of guilt and pain when something I tried to convey from the bowels of my being just couldn’t…come out right. Just wasn’t accurately portrayed in the veil that I had initially hoped and felt for. I myself, had driven towards the lanes of perfection and have for many, many years tried to contort myself into a product of complete wholeness and resolution. But I ask you, what is the ultimate satisfaction in this form of thinking?
I understand the strive for perfection is in itself a way to control ones own destiny. To find a meaning, or goal, to follow and to hope for–and I whole heartedly agree there must be meaning and reason behind anything we choose to do in the vast freedoms of our life, but to what advantage can we contrive from aiming for perfection?
Are we not, in ourselves, saying that by focusing our attentions on the status of perfection, we are hoping to perch ourselves amongst the company of perhaps a God, or a machine? Now you may automatically interrupt that it is unhealthy to look to such depths – into matters merely formulated for good productivity. That we are not literally adapting to become an omnipotent resolution (on behalf of the fact that it is naturally impossible to be that.) But I ask you to search and think… from everything you know and can observe from around you, perfection has not been realistically viewed upon amongst society as exactly the only thing it can be, which is a glimmer of hope, a will to keep running, or in short a knowledgably intangible fragment of human perception. Instead, it has become something much more tangible in the thirsty eyes of man. Passions have become obsessions and the strive for human perfection, is in itself, become a retreat from our own humanity. The will to become a scientifically absolute being, immortalized in functionality and patterned consistent results – describes not a perfect human, because again, there is no such thing. To me, this resolution marks a longing for “robotniks.” Perfection has become a quest into an age of machina, and unfortunately we will continuously come to realize that this goal is in no way a plausible one, but rather a detriment to our own human vitalities, as well as instinctual, unique self - characters.
I do not agree that perfection should be even thought upon when constructing or interacting with anything that we do. The marks of our natural flaws are the bookmarks to our soul, the proofs of our human attributes. The path of perfection, the path that we choose, in our minds, hopes to lead us to a destination in which an exchange of human for machine parts is located, and becomes a never ending quest that will only tire and brittle our ego and bones – leaving you weaker in spirit rather than stronger in being. The cost of our human complexities and errors are too great a price to consciously be ready to give away in an instance of recognition or power.
Our flaws are again – what make us who we are!
Too often the judgments of others become the swooping blade that rips out who we are, our capabilities, our potentialities, our distinct instinctual selves. We fall as victim to critics, and in the wakes of these happenings we strive to cognitively and in full awareness, pursue a path that will leave no room for repeated troubles or error, and this becomes enforced by excruciating terms of punishment that we lay upon our own self when terms of perfection are not met – which again, I’m sorry to disappoint you, can never even be met in the first place. We create shells of steel and armor to bury and protect ourselves in when we feel shamed by our offset patterns, but is this not just another description of a robot – a being encased in metal and steel, cold to the sensitivities and wondrous forms of organic Earth?
We are ourselves Earth. We are apart of everything in so many ways and to hide from our human selves is in my opinion blasphemous in its nature. We mustn’t strive to be perfect, strive to be the complete definition of everything admirable and true. It is just something that cannot, and should not, be taken seriously because the weight of this determination is far too heavy for any sensitive human being to carry. Our nature is to be only ourselves. Our responsibility in the giant quilt workings of everything is to be only true to what it is we know and do.
To be a human, to understand and bask in both our glories and flaws, is to me, a much greater gift than the promise or attainment of absolute excellence – in short, I choose life over any kind of perfection.
