I WORK AS A COUNSELLOR in a downtown Toronto college and daily my students sweat and yearn to be perfect. They desire the highest marks, the best presentations, the question perfectly formed before they ask it in class. It’s not only these hardworking and focused folks with their back-straining backpacks  – I see a desire for perfection in many people. Sometimes in myself and my friends. Also in my private practice clients. A desire for perfection can, in certain moments, have the intensity of someone clinging to life against death. It’s as if people are expressing: “If I can do the perfect job on _______ , then I exist.” It could be anything. A paper at school. Your exam. Your job interview. A birthday party for your child. Your dress. Your life.

Of course, striving for great things is motivating and good. But, as many Buddhists, wise men and women and poets have attested, we are perfect. We are simply perfect the way that we are. Parents do the best they can with their children. Husbands and wives and siblings love how they know best. Students attempt their courses with the tools they have. If we can loosen this pursuit of perfection in exchange for “good”, or “good enough”, we have space to breathe, to be flexible and to do a better job than when we were fixated on the frozen desire for perfection.

The Japanese word Wabi Sabi speaks to this imperfection within perfection. It is a word that relates to a beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. In a Japanese tea bowl, for instance, an inperfection in the curve of the bowl, is seen as the essence of simplicity and beauty.

Thomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet and therapist, also wrote on imperfection, on a human scale.

Romanesque Arches

Inside the huge romanesque church
the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle-flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething
piazza together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones,
Mrs. Tanaka and Signora Sabatini,
and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.

In a practical sense, we can expand and play within our own endless vaults by poking fun at our ideas of self-perfection. A quick experiment around this would be to draw a picture with pencil crayons as badly as you can. Let the pencils just move and draw the most imperfect cow or fish or person you can draw. Have fun making mistakes! Getting it “wrong”! And notice how it feels to let go. To care less. And how free your hand moves without you.

For more blog posts, see my site, “TheArtofTherapy.ca” or email me at deganadavis@gmail.ca