“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” — Matthew 5:48.
With full respect to our elder brother, let me venture another point of view.
This is the life we get to make mistakes in, to bump noses, to misspeak or misinterpret and have to explain, to fall down and pick ourselves back up again, to make utter fools of ourselves now and then, to find we’ve hurt each others’ feelings and apologize and sob our hearts out and forgive and be forgiven. We have a lifetime of perhaps a century or less, even much much less, to practice everything, and get it all wrong at first if we must, and then work around to getting it all right. This is the temporary life, the sandbox. Let’s learn and grow from the experience while we have the precious opportunity!
The next life is the permanent one, where whatever is, lasts forever, and must be exactly, perfectly right — and by then we’ll be perfect by definition, “past perfect” in its most grammatical sense; this life will be over and done with, gone and completed, perfect as in dead. Why rush ahead to the time of no second chances? Why disdain, and discard unused, our one blessèd chance to be imperfect now?
The late Robert Lynn Asprin, who as “Yang the Nauseating” founded the SCA’s Dark Horde, made part of its philosophy the goal of perfection, an ideal he derived from his martial arts background. He was another “elder brother” I differed with to this extent.
The utopianly pacific martial art Aikido’s founder Morihei Ueshiba (whose side I share here) took a more grounded stance: “Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead.” — The Art of Peace. “Never think of yourself as an all-knowing, perfected master,” he advised; on which basis he declined to wear the prestigious mastery belt of his own school.
Daniel Steinbock’s “Perfect Is Dead” discusses “the elusive aesthetic principle of wabi sabi [in Japanese art]... an attitude towards one’s craft that embraces imperfection. ... For wabi sabi practitioners, perfection is just a head trip.... a perfect form is dead. It has no room to grow, move, stretch, or transform, because any change spells a deviation from perfection. Perfection is rigid, stultifying to innovation, end-all-be-all, boring. Imperfect is alive, in flux, starts arguments, and raises questions....”
Consider the saying, “the perfect is the enemy of the good [enough]”. Among other meanings: doing something well may be rendered impossible by striving to do it perfectly. (Striving to do it better, as time and other priorities allow, is another matter. Are deadlines an issue? The perfectionist may not finish.)
No comments:
Post a Comment