It’s so obvious. Who wouldn’t want the perfect house, career, or family? I’ll take all three please! Life, however, wasn’t always centered around the relentless pursuit of perfection. By life, I mean life on earth before before humans. Back then, nothing was perfect.
In fact, for the approximate 13.8 Billion years before humans existed, the Universe did just fine with no obvious plan or design. Evolution itself is based on mutations, or mistakes. As the theory goes, the animals with the right deformities adapted to their environments and survived while the unlucky others died off.
Nature is flawed, unpredictable, and even chaotic. It doesn’t care about precision, order, or neatness. You and I, in everyday life, not only accept but occasionally celebrate this fact. For example, no two sunsets are alike, yet each is stunning in its own way. Thus, we feel compelled to photograph them.
Ironically, what we’ve come to appreciate in nature, we seek to eradicate in ourselves. Some of us doggedly hunt down our faults while others cover them up with pride. Either way, the reason we want perfection so badly is because we think we’ve seen it before. And, we are wrong.
Human-Derived Perfection: Symmetry
Consider the most beautiful plants, animals, and even people you’ve ever seen. They probably all have at least one thing in common, symmetry. Simultaneously it captivates and calms us. Take any photo or work of art and cut it in half, and you’re typically left with two balanced pieces. That’s symmetry and we love it – mostly.
For example, think of the people you see in fashion ads. Their faces are usually quite symmetrical. However, wouldn’t the faces of mannequins be even more so? Sounds creepy, I know. Perhaps it’s the imperfections that bring a human face to life?
Even when nature presents us with what looks to be perfection, it’s an illusion. For example, the horizon at the beach fools our eye into seeing a straight line. Someone might even say that symmetrical division of Earth and sky is symmetrical. Logically we know, however, that what we’re really seeing is an amalgam of thousands, if not millions, of distant undulating waves.
Human-derived perfection: Certainty
We don’t just imagine perfection in what we see, we also project it onto situations of cause and effect. In the business world, we look to high-achieving employees as models of flawless execution. In doing so, we fail to take into account the myriad of random circumstances that allow a given employee’s labor to come to fruition. Therefore, what we really celebrate is a perfect outcome, not a perfect performance.
Still, we fool ourselves into thinking certainty exists. If we just follow the right rules, we’re guaranteed to get the desired outcome. It’s comforting to have a plan. Otherwise, we can feel lost in the wilderness of random chance.
Like the humanizing flaws on a model’s face, the mistakes and uncertainty we face are what makes life fresh and real. We say we want the steps to success when, in reality, if life was that predictable, it would bore us to death!
Randomness and the perfect snowflake
If there was such a thing as a perfect snowflake design, wouldn’t nature have figured it out by now? Nature’s strategy, if it has one, is complete randomness. Plants, animals, people, we all enter the world in near-limitless variation.
Our response is to resist randomness with things like gridded streets and manicured lawns. We simplify and shape nature’s complexity down to the simple designs we understand. And we harness natural resources to perform the narrow tasks required to continue our pursuit of perfection.
Self-Acceptance vs. Self-Improvement
Perhaps much of what we consider to be flaws are just variation. Our genes are like a hand of poker and our traits the individual cards. Some cards are weak and some strong; that is, if you choose to accept the rules of the game. Therefore, your so-called weaknesses could stem, not from you but from the game you choose to play.
A lot of us say we only want to improve while secretly coveting perfection. We claim to seek growth when, in reality, we have some arbitrary goal we’ve set as the only path to happiness. Therefore, we continue on, seeking to eliminate imperfections, in ourselves, in others, and in the world.
Failure for the win!
Meanwhile, mistakes have spawned some of the greatest discoveries (penicillin, the microwave, the inkjet printer to name a few). Maybe we should continually seek to improve but not always to dictate the direction of our improvement. And, maybe we can be open to the idea that flaws and mistakes may bring good news.
We like to say “to err is human,” when in reality errors exist all around us in nature. A better saying might be “to perfect is human.” As for the Universe, it’s doing just fine with chaos and disorder. It was here long before us and is likely to remain long after we’re gone.
Sincerely,
Meaning2work.com