The word imperfectionism appeared in the air around me this week, for good reason. Since the beginning of the year I've taken on several things I can in no way fully accomplish in any short term way--things that require prayer, by which I mean, I can't see the end of them and must leave open space for what might be called pregnant possibility or divine intervention.
These aren't things I have to do : knitting, going into the next phase of healthy eating, becoming fluent in Spanish, but they all contribute toward greater fluidity in my life. They also all seem important to do now, at the same time, contributing into the same eventual leap, if you will.
Can I know what that leap is? I can not. Is that unnerving? It is. In these pursuits I can't see the end of, other things which have seemed right and been comforting before, have had to drop away. I have to risk that should I reach for them down the line, they will no longer be available.
When my kids express feeling stuck or concerned that they aren't heading somewhere, I can easily trace for them that from the outside, that there is progress. I can easily encourage them to have faith in the whole they can't quite see, and in doing things they are drawn to for their own sake, trusting intuition. And I do believe that's right, that the years my son has spent learning to draw, only for that interest to drop off, contributes now to his concentration on music, whether or not he can draw clear lines between the two.
As I parent, do I wish he would develop the same interest in say, coding? Yes I do. 
Backing up from the beautiful human dilemma of trying to drive destiny and create stability, I realize that what's missing is synthesis, synchronization. It is fine to do 'all the things' and more, but to be so worried over whether every action matters is a programmed and heavily agenda-ed perfectionism. In social justice circles there is some discussion of whether it even traces back to a colonistic mindset which seeks to sell the idea of civilized and non-civilized cultures. I'm fascinated by this, because ideas about what constitute good manners and cleanliness, for instance, feed into mass consumption.
How do we really extricate ourselves from such deeply ingrained ideas that seem on their face, to be right? How do we keep the gains? I believe in collective society, yet live a rather isolated life, adhere to notions of personal responsibility, repulsed by the value systems of large swaths of my fellow humans.
Accepting this, the only answer seems to be leaning even further into the unknown, the pregnant possibility itself, the greater non-doing portion of the equation.
WordPress.com
No comments:
Post a Comment