If I had to choose between being real and being perfect, I’d choose being real.
The more you try to be perfect, the more you lose yourself. In our unending chase after perfection, we lose our identity and take on the identity of how things ought to be. How things ought to be is not fully in our control, and perfection is not meant to be chased. The more you run towards it, the farther it runs from you. Trying to make everything perfect will only make things imperfect.
Can you simply be yourself? That’s perfect! It’s effortless, unpretentious and un-exasperating. That’s it. The more you “be” yourself, the more “perfect” you become. Maybe that’s what perfection really stands for; true authenticity. Fully being yourself without any impurities of external influences. Authenticity is the ultimate perfection.
Isn’t it amazing that for all people who have ever lived, are alive and will ever live, there is only one YOU? There is nobody like you and there’ll never be anyone like you. That’s true authenticity; a kind of perfection that can only be divinely orchestrated.
Yes, you may have the same nose as your parents, the same handwriting as a stranger or even the same interest as a friend, but you’re unique and there’s none like you. Yes, you have flaws and shortcomings and have zero talent in certain areas, yet no one comes close to being you.
They can be like you. You can be like them, but your idiosyncrasy is one in 7 billion. None can be compared to you. So why do we try so hard to live like someone else? Let no one pressurize and intimidate you into being someone you’re not. Love who you are just the way you are.
Art and science. Logic and emotions. Work and play. These words are not opposites but having the two creates a design principle of the universe: balance. This principle is not that everything should be balanced but that everything IS balanced. This is because balance is not a matter of choice or preference. Where there is no balance, there is destruction; a break in the cycle of resurgence where everything just swirls into depletion and nothingness. It is the basic ingredient of existence.
Balance: Perfection’s Best Kept Secret
Perfection is a scary word for many, really. Use it three or four times in a sentence and someone will definitely give you a lecture of how things can’t be perfect. True! We are not powerful enough to control the balance of ups and downs, highs and lows or even foreknow if the good will outweigh the bad in any decision we make. The power to make things perfect is not even 5% in our hands. There will always be a margin of error.
However, perfection simply means complete. Have you seen how the earth revolves around the sun using the sun’s gravity? That’s perfect! If it were slightly lower by even an inch raised to the power of an inch, our earth will rotate slowly away into the “nothingness” of space. If it were slightly higher by the same margin, the earth will rotate slowly towards the sun until it was completely burned up by the sun’s harmful radiations. Do you see that balance?
That’s not the only example in nature. I could talk about reproduction and childbirth, atmospheric pressure, the human brain, the cycle of nitrogen, the food chain, and so on. The good part about all this is; we haven’t discovered a tenth of all there is to know about the universe. Yet, we see it clearly. A lot of what we call perfection is balance at work. Perfection can choose not to exist and we’ll be perfectly fine. The day balance leaves office, hell will break lose. Balance is literally what’s holding hell from breaking lose.
Balance: the Shortcut to Consistency
Life is so unpredictable, and all we feed our brains from social media is how inconsistent and messed up one thing or another is. It was only a matter of time until someone popularizes the idea that there’s no such thing as consistency. To be honest, consistency really sounds like a cool word for perfection. It would have been easy to sell the idea that it’s as unrealistic as perfection.
Guess what makes consistency possible? It’s not sheer will power or motivation or even knowledge. We all can know what to do and still watch ourselves not do it. We ride our consistency on the shoulders of motivation till it exhausts, then we’re more inconsistent than we were before. Consistency is more about holding something together, keeping it going like a cycle. You can’t force it.
Of course, there are no shortcuts to consistency. However, what makes consistency consistent in the long-term is balance. If you keep your hands up for like forever, it’s called punishment. If you keep your hands up for 2 minutes and bring it down for about 45 seconds so you could keep it up again for 2 minutes, it’s called exercise. Creating that balance is what makes you consistent. You don’t have to beat yourself up.
Work, but don’t kill yourself working. Rest, but don’t be lazy. Have some days off. Resurgence, remember? If you don’t balance exertion and rest, either of them is bound to destroy you. As aforementioned, where there is no balance there is destruction. Balance keeps you in a cycle to keep on keeping on.
