Giving Everything Its Due: Practicing Imperfection

When I decide to do something, I like doing it well. Especially when it comes to activities and projects that are important to me, I want to feel like I’m really accomplishing something when I set myself to it. And I want my passion and my attention to detail to show in the results of my work, no matter how many people – or how few – will ever see or experience those results. The truth is, I can be a bit of a perfectionist sometimes.

This has its upsides, of course, but there’s a price as well. Sometimes I’ll catch myself holding back on something new even when I’d really like to join in, afraid of being less than perfect at it, or maybe fearful that I’ll be judged harshly, either by others or – probably more likely – by my own overwhelmingly tough inner critic.

Other times, I’ll keep a project simmering so long that it loses all sense of purpose and direction, stagnating on the back burner when it might have been done ages ago. At the office, this can take the shape of a project I don’t want to let go of because I think I can make it just a little bit better before anyone else sees it. In other areas of my life, it might take the form of a bunch of new music I’ve written that I can’t quite bring myself to start sharing with others because I’m still tweaking an accompaniment, reworking a song’s bridge for the hundredth time, or just questioning whether any of what I’ve written was ever any good to begin with.

All of this takes its toll, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. When projects and ideas languish over weeks, months, or even years, they’re never entirely absent from our minds. They’re always in there someplace, tugging at our subconscious, popping up at random moments to remind us of all the things in our lives left undone and all the things left incomplete.

Even worse, I suspect, are the missed opportunities for meaningful connection with other people – those times when we hold back in our relationships because we’re not sure that what we have to offer – or who we are – is really good enough. How many friendships do we lose out on this way? How many opportunities to be of service do we miss? How much potential happiness – for ourselves and for others – do we forgo when we let fear stop us in our tracks?

Not long ago, someone suggested I try “giving everything its due.” At first, the perfectionist in me heard this to mean that you have to give your all-out effort to everything you do, one hundred percent of the time. But there’s another side to it, too, which was only clear after some reflection.

The fact is that we’re constantly making decisions in our lives about how and where to focus our attention, how to spend our time, how to rank the importance of the thousand-and-one things that always seem to need doing. We live in a fast-moving world that often feels like it’s speeding up all the time, and distractions are ubiquitous.

When the day is done, I do think that our own intention and focus really make a difference. And I believe that our own excitement and commitment to the work we do can be contagious, getting others excited too and fostering healthy creative collaborations and mutual respect. But we need to be willing to accept that “giving everything its due” also means knowing what doesn’t need doing, or what perhaps needs doing but doesn’t actually need to be “perfect” after all.

For a lot of us, this is a hard lesson to learn. We set such high standards for ourselves, then think that our value is in all that we accomplish. I know that for me, personally, I’ve got an awful lot of my pride and sense of self-worth tied up in the fruits of my labors. A part of me is always conscious of the short stretch of time we ultimately have in this life, and I want to make as good a showing as possible while I’m here.

But life is full of difficult choices, and we can’t let our perfectionism keep us from getting started or, once started, from moving forward on a chosen path. Just as we sometimes have to set out on a journey before we know where the path leads, sometimes maybe the best option when approaching a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is to choose the path of imperfection.

It doesn’t have to mean doing things sloppily or with any kind of indifference. On the contrary, maybe the practice of imperfection, rightly understood, can require just as much care as perfectionism. Often, in our perfectionism, we get swept up in our need to get everything just right. Imperfection, practiced mindfully, might offer one kind of antidote to that obsessive approach that can seem to make us prisoners of the work we do rather than its free and independent practitioners.

Imperfection, in this view, might offer us a kind of permission – permission to blunder ahead before we have all the answers and before we fully know the way, without worrying too much what we might look like to others, or to our own inner critics. Practicing imperfection, then, gets us back to that important concept of beginner’s mind.

If we can learn to practice imperfection judiciously in our lives – embracing our weaknesses together with our strengths – we might even find undiscovered resources of time, energy, and creativity we didn’t know we had. If we can release ourselves from just a bit of the constant pressure we so often put ourselves under, letting it go along with our relentless need to be perfect, maybe then we can start actually giving everything its due – and living more balanced, graceful lives in the process.