For long, I’ve been wondering (more like pondering) what my first blog would be about. Although I’ve started with innumerable blogs, and sometimes even felt that overpowering feeling of euphoria, something just didn’t feel right and I would leave it. Truth is I would actually delete it and pretend that I never wrote it.
But that ‘something that doesn’t feel right’ is a mistake we all do daily and sometimes it even keeps us from achieving our goals and dreams – I’m talking about striving to perfection. It takes over our lives and actually makes us quite miserable.
When I was younger, an artist, who taught me some of her traits, told me that I should leave a painting as is and not try to fix some of the mistakes. I think I remember her saying: “By trying to fix it in your search of ‘perfection’ it might ruin the painting,” and with much needed self-restraint, I did exactly that.
Afterwards, looking at different paintings from afar and close I realised exactly what she meant. That little mistakes and human errors are what makes some paintings beautiful and unique. It’s those paintings that can never be replicated; you feel as if that painter gave a piece of who they are and imprinted it on their painting.
I believe that this is relevant to our lives as well. We strive for perfection and to gain it, you leave no space for error. Every morning there’s a battle in me when I look at my reflection in the mirror. I hate myself because I ate that chocolate cake and now I’m even farther away from the ‘perfect body’. I hate myself because I was too lazy to wash off the makeup from my face and now I won’t have the ‘perfect skin’. It can go on and on… So by striving for perfection we’ve even grown to hate ourselves when we can’t achieve it. We fight with ourselves and everybody around us when it seems that we’ve failed, yet again.
Even the media are feeding us in our ‘perfection frenzy’. They give us ‘secrets’ on how to attain the perfect body, perfect skin, perfect partner, perfect job and we’re left feeling even more miserable than before after reading it. But what happens after you achieve this ‘perfection’? What happens when you’ve achieved perfection and you feel unloved and depressed?
We sometimes turn a blind eye to those people who have unlocked the door to happiness. I’m talking about those people who took society’s norm of what perfection is, rolled it in a small ball and threw it in the trash can, because at the end of the day perfection is just a relative term. They’re the ones that always seem happy with their ‘imperfections’ and use it to their advantage.
For me, finding happiness and being happy should be the key to success and something worth striving for. Maybe also living in the moment has a big impact on this. People, who strive for perfection, tend to be focused on the future or the past – never the present. How can you truly enjoy life when you’re mentally not present in the moment?
