Imperfect Perfection

Mama Kat

Inspired by Challenge

The women in my family are currently sharing the book Mistakes I Made at Work by Jessica Bacal.  It includes essays capturing interviews with twenty-five professional women who have accomplished much across a wide variety of fields.  My favorite section of the book is "Learning Resilience", and my favorite essay in this section is the interview with author and film-maker  Ruth Ozeki.  Each interview concludes with tips; Ozeki's second tip spoke to my heart:

The act of bringing anything into the world, of taking an idea and making it real means bringing it from the state of absolute perfection in your mind into a state of relative imperfection in reality.  Every novel or painting is like this: perfect in the maker's mind, but imperfectly realized.  You can look at this as a mistake or simply as an opportunity to engage--because it's through the making of mistakes that we are able to live creative lives.  

The parenting equivalent of the point Ozeki makes is the understanding that we learn more through our mistakes than we do from experiences that seem to go flawlessly.  Truth be told, we humans are rarely flawless at all, but times we come closest are when we are performing tasks or using skills we have already mastered.  Real growth does not occur here. Learning and stretching lie in the untested.  Handmade commands a higher price than machine made because there is beauty and interest in the imperfect, and there are so few among us willing to go the distance to create a thing of beauty or to risk sharing it with the world.  Don't be discouraged when things don't go exactly as you envisioned they would; your vision is limited by your imagination.  Take a risk and trust.  What may at first appear imperfect as it is unfolding, may evolve into the very plan God envisioned for you.  The plan that takes you beyond your wildest dreams.