I inherited this 1937 Eaton Beauty doll from my aunt. She's just perfect, isn't she? In fact, she's not. She's in great shape, but like everything else, time has taken its toll. If you look carefully you can see she has a small chip and a crack on the left corner of her mouth.
I'm sure the day Aunt Ruth received her, she seemed absolutely perfect. But even then she wasn't really. No matter how well she was made, I'm sure a close examination would have revealed small irregularities here or there. Since that time she has undergone many changes, including a whole new set of clothes. In the world of antiques, all of these would work together to make her less desirable, but not to me. To me she is perfect because of her imperfections, because of the experiences she has encountered and survived.
As a classroom teacher, I often had children make what they considered to be irreparable mistakes on a painting in art class and want to throw out the whole thing and start again. Part of working with art is learning how to take an error and and make it into something unique, interesting and perhaps even extraordinary. The original mistake can take the painting in a whole new direction and perhaps help it become even more fascinating. It all depends on how you look at it.
Sometimes we can just get too detail-oriented, bringing everything, including ourselves, unrelentingly under the microscope, hyper-focused on exposing every tiny imperfection. When we do this, we lose sight of the larger picture and torture ourselves unnecessarily. Perhaps even worse is when we turn the microscope on others, judging them continuously for small flaws which we look for and inevitably find.
Life is full of glorious imperfections that add beauty and interest to everything we see, both in the natural world and in the people around us. We need to learn to love the imperfections, even in ourselves!
As a reader and a writer, there is nothing more annoying than a "perfect" character. A perfect character can't learn, grow or change. As a writer there's really no place to go with them, except to expose them to experiences which make them more human.
In short, perfection is a fleeting moment at best and almost always an illusion.
I'll try to comment again! Comments aren't working on my blog either - I've gone through settings and tried to enable them, but nothing appears. I enjoyed this piece about perfection. In terms of crafts and sewing I take the approach that I'll just pretend that the mistake was part of the original design. But in terms of writing it's more of a struggle - editing, editing and editing over and over leading to, you guessed it! Dismal productivity. It's a challenge for many of us, I think.
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