Let's put perfection in its place

I have a love and hate relationship with perfection where usually hate predominates over love. Sometimes I imagine perfection to be an old, severe woman with a pallid face who is always unhappy with the result of my efforts. It's a cold, lifeless affair pertaining to Japanese dolls and distant snow-clad mountain peaks. As a child I often told myself  If the world was perfect I would have no place in it, now I know that nobody would have any place in it.

Why are we so enamoured by perfection when we are  continents of imperfections, crooked teeth, falling hair, running nose, fraying tempers, hidden jealousies, indecent desires and what we would like to present to the world is a serene exterior, well combed hair, sparkling teeth, controlled gestures like those glossy magazine models with fake backgrounds. What if you met one of those beautiful, ravishing babes and right in the middle of the conversation she farted a loud, evil- smelling one. What would you do? I know what she would do. If she was really convinced about her purityshe would carry on the conversation as if nothing had happened and you in the process would believe it too.  Or she would pause for a second and gaze at you incredulously and you would end up believing that it is you who had farted and not her!Beware of perfect beings!!

How often I have started something and not gone to the end of it because it wasn't perfect,  as if attempts had no right to exist . Maybe many of you too suffer from this overdose of self criticism whereby you set the standard so high that you give up out of a sense of helplessness right in the beginning. I know that for me when the result becomes the goal the creative joy of the process is lost. My friend once out of sheer boredom painted a canvas called " Lost Time." He was not going anywhere, he was not aiming for something , he was just doing and because he didn't set out to create something fantastic, he didn't lose time but delineated  his perception of it on  canvas.

Arunima