A Book Reading and a Lesson in Imperfection 

Last Saturday I did a book reading and signing at SOMOS Bookstore. It was wonderful. The room was filled, and despite being quite nervous early on, by the time of the reading I was surprisingly calm. Typical of me, I had spent a long time writing an intro to the talk and deliberated long and hard about which passages from America in Therapy to share, as if I was in danger of choosing the wrong ones and would then somehow fail. I practiced and timed the presentation and rewrote the intro at least 10 times. By the time I got to SOMOS, it was “good enough.”

The Illusion of Perfection

There was no perfection to be had, though unconsciously I think I was holding out for that even though I know it is not possible, largely because there is no such thing. The whole idea of perfection is intrinsically elusive and inevitably subjective. Perhaps the striving for it is the result of an unknown configuration of genes, designed to keep us on a path to growth and development, that has somehow mutated into an automatic mechanism for continual negative comparison and self-judgment. By default, the idea of perfection calls up images of everything we have not quite achieved, close perhaps, or perhaps not, but in any case just out of reach. How easily the striving to do something well can come back to bite us.

I Need to Take My Own Advice! 

America in Therapy is not about achieving any kind of perfection, so I need to listen to my own words. We are human, we don’t have to be perfectly calm, always compassionate, perfectly responsible or loving– because we won’t be, at least not at this stage of human evolution. What there is to do is to embrace our imperfection and know we can strive for more and better without having to slaughter ourselves when we fall short of our own expectations– and certainly not slaughter others either when they fall short. It’s about staying in the game of doing all we can to create loving relationships with ourselves and other people. It is about staying in the game with a boatload of compassion for the fact that we don’t know how to do it “perfectly,” but are learning as we go.

This is a Story That is Crying to be Rewritten!

Before I had a typewriter (this definitely dates me) I wrote all my school assignments by hand and re-wrote them several times so that my handwriting would be “perfect.” I think that school-girl is still alive  and kicking inside me, and she is begging to be relieved of her thankless task. The new story she wants to write may have misspelled words, dangling participles, and lots of crossed out lines. That’s actually her reality anyway. That’s my reality. That’s my life. That’s life for humans.

We are Editing Our Lives

When I read through my book looking for what I would share for the reading, there were so many edits I still wanted to make of the basic text, and you know I edited that book more times than I can count before I submitted it to the publisher.

But that’s the point, I remind myself, that editing our lives again and again is actually the human condition, and it takes a boatload of compassion and deep understanding to accept the story we wrote yesterday and dare to write another one today…imperfectly.