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Perfection

Writer's picture: Doug WeissDoug Weiss

My paternal grandfather was a perfectionist, at least that was the word I used before I knew what obsessive compulsive disorder meant. My father inherited some of those same traits, though fortunately they were diluted by a generation and I must admit that some of that behavior lingers on in me. Of course, as a young person I did not know what being a perfectionist meant, I only knew that some of my grandfather’s habits were a bit, well to be honest, strange. As an example, in his seventies and eighties, when his knees and hips had failed him, he would lie on the lawn beside his modest suburban home and pick weeds out of the grass--for hours at a time.

Don’t get me wrong, that was probably the least strange of his behaviors. Grandad was brilliant, an engineer and inventor who made a great deal of money early in his career by inventing ways to make high speed printing possible for newspapers and other materials. He went on to develop many innovations in packaging but never made another dime beyond the royalties he earned from his early inventions. It seems that the first few times he filed for patents he worked with an attorney well practiced in the field. Once he decided he knew everything that the attorney knew, Grandfather wrote his own patents. Unfortunately, he actually did not know what that attorney knew and every single patent he wrote was successfully challenged.

A lesser man might have concluded that he should leave expert work to experts, but not my grandfather. He persisted to the very end of his life, certain that the fault lay not in anything he had done but the cunning of highly paid lawyers working for scoundrel companies. He wasn’t all wrong, but that is why he needed one of those highly paid attorneys to write his patents so they could not be easily bypassed.

I have been thinking about him lately as I worked in my yard spreading mulch and taking care to make sure none got on the leaves of tender young plants. Never mind that the wind and rain would take care of this problem in short order, the pride of seeing a nice uniform and orderly yard compelled me to invest the extra time. Thanks Grandad.

Now I could write at length about the waste of time and how I might have better used it to do things for others or to simply enjoy life, but that is not my purpose in this post. Besides, I quite enjoyed the work. It was relatively mindless, leaving me time to think about any number of other things of far more value, and it kept me out in the air and sunshine.

Instead I want to talk about how the internal desire to do things right, a noble and lofty objective, can sometimes get in the way of a bigger plan for our lives and those of others. What my grandfather and I share, beside our penchant for obsessive yard work, is a discomfort with the law of entropy. Let’s face it the world is disorderly, and awkward at best, and sometimes downright ornery. I come from a family of engineers, we like the world to be orderly and to operate by rules. We are uncomfortable when nature, other people, or that higher being throws a monkey wrench in our plans.

I love the beautiful yellow Irises and white Peonies that bloom in early spring in my yard, almost as much as the pink Roses that line the corner, but I hate the blooms when they decay and fall off making a mess. Everyone else can admire the blooms still on the plants; all I see are the dead and dried up remains littered on the ground, ruining the perfection of the freshly laid mulch. But the dead flowers are the inevitable by-product of the magnificent blooms. You cannot have the one without the other.

That my friends is a metaphor for life. Things and people blossom and grow, and at some point, they die. Perfection does not sustain forever, neither man-made nor God made. I have come to understand that my appreciation of the blooms is hastened by my knowledge that their lives will be short. In much the same way, a bit of disorder makes me appreciate those times when things go smoothly and serenity prevails. So too, the keen reminders of what I have lost paint those I loved with a beauty that transcends what they were in life. The sharp edges of reality are knocked off the corners and my memory fills in the details with a softer, more diffuse recollection; a gentler and more noble picture.

There is nothing wrong with striving for perfection. It is in us to try to make things as good as they can be. But it is important to remember that a little bit of imperfection now and again is also a good thing. Scientists have studied the human face to try to understand the principles behind beauty. One of their observations is that perfectly symmetrical faces are never handsome or pretty. The beauty comes from slight differences between the two sides of a face. It is the slightly crooked nose, the small cleft in the chin, the elfin ears—the things which are not perfection that have characterized many of those we hold up as paragons. So too, it is the flaws in us, our weaknesses and even our failures that make us so terribly human and also make us the people we are. As we strive to overcome our flaws we alter our character and our humanity. Imperfection leads us closer to becoming the people we are meant to be.

The next time you see someone or something that just misses the mark, falls short of whatever standard you may be tempted to apply, try to remember that they are works in progress. Their imperfections and our own are just God’s way of teaching us how to make our way in this world and prepare us for whatever comes next.


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