Have no fear of perfection–you’ll never reach it. –Salvador Dali
One of the things I’ve learned in yoga is that there is no such thing as perfect. There is always more you can do: go deeper in a pose, take it to the next level of complexity, hold it a little longer, transition a little smoother. You might be solid in something one day, only to struggle with the same pose the next day. Or even the next minute. Balance is fickle and slight variations in speed or fluidity can make a huge difference. When you view your yoga practice as an evolution–a zone where perfect doesn’t exist–it’s not only easier to see progress, it’s also easier to let go of the missteps.
Off the yoga mat, I find it a lot harder to embrace the imperfections in my life–especially in the important areas–but really, it’s the same process. Life, relationships, careers…everything evolves. There is no perfect, no panacea. When something happens to sully or taint our vision of perfection, it’s like a cold shower. Particularly when we feel we have a track record to uphold. We’ve always been so healthy, until we’re not. We’ve never been fired, until we are. Our relationships are rock solid, until they aren’t. We have a perfect driving record, until we don’t.
When we have to assimilate an event that is incongruous to what we believe the reality to be, we are forced to first admit that there is a new reality; and second (and this part comes later), that what we thought was reality was never really the truth anyway. No relationship, no child, no job or career, no human body can live up to a clean track record indefinitely. It isn’t a failing or a breakdown in our lives, but rather an unwillingness to acknowledge our own frailties–ones that have always existed–that lead us to disappointment.
When something happens that shatters our perception of perfection, we might look for someone to blame. We might blame ourselves by replaying our actions again and again in our minds, imagining what we could have done differently. We might torture ourselves with “what ifs,” believing that if we had just done things a little differently, everything would have stayed the same as before. But that’s not possible. We struggle to accept the idea that perfection was always a myth, like a unicorn or a pot of gold, and was destined to elude us.
Slowly, we integrate the new reality: Our lives have cracks. Cracks that were always there, but which take time to surface, like a house that settles over the years before you begin to notice hairline cracks in the ceiling or above a doorframe. The pressure points were always there, but they aren’t apparent upon initial inspection.
Self-help books might tell you to embrace imperfection, to celebrate it. I appreciate the wisdom in that advice, but I think it’s okay to mourn it, too. There is a loss of innocence anytime you notice a new crack in the wall of your life. Even when it’s been repaired, you know that it’s there–and usually, when you look hard, you can still see where the damage occurred. There is a longing for a time when you didn’t know about it, because then you didn’t see it or have to worry about how to repair it–or how to hide it.
Ultimately, though, loss of innocence leads to greater wisdom and peace. Like children who want to believe in Santa Claus, adults might dream of perfection; we even kid ourselves that we have it. But we don’t, and we never did. This is sad, but it’s also liberating. Once we remove the pressure of maintaining perfection (or the image of it), we can get on with the business of living a life of greater depth and less superficiality. After all, looking only at the surface of things is one of the ways we convince ourselves that perfection exists in the first place. Once we look beyond the coat of paint and the drywall, we see what’s really going on behind the scenes. Most people are afraid to look; some never do. And they live small, contained lives as a result.
Cracks in the wall don’t make for a weak foundation–and they give the house some character. I still mourn the lack of perfection in some areas of my life, but deep down, I know that my lost innocence in one area has led to greater maturity in another.
And we all have to grow up at some point.