The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information,
but to face our moments as sacred
Abraham Herschel
Tag: balance
On being amazing and perfect
When entering a supermarket store on Saturday I was greeted with a banner telling me that shopping there would make this Christmas “the most perfect ever”. This desire for perfect conditions is necessary when we are young, in order to allow the development of a stable self. As the English psychoanalyst Winnicott said, “the mind has a root in the need of the individual, at the core of the self, for a perfect environment”. However, as the child grows, its capacity to live with a less than perfect environment develops and the mother just has to be “good enough” in an ongoing committed relationship rather than being perfect in every instance. And it is the same for us as adults.
Our lives are always a work in progress, with moments of failing followed by repairing, integration mixed with disintegration. Despite what we sometimes think and express from time to time, we don’t really need perfection. We push ourselves hard enough due to that false belief. That things go wrong – despite our best efforts – is just part of the human condition. What we really want is to be seen as we are – not completely sorted out – and for that to be good enough.
It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.
But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up. But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.
Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.
A way of holding
More on butterflies and lightness in dealing with the daily events, or more precisely, the thoughts they give rise to :
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.
Mary Oliver, One or Two Things
photo andre engels
More fun
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
photo Barney Moss
Sunday Quote: Wholeness
We can sometimes feel fragmented in our inner life, sucked into a crisis, pulled in all directions, but…
There is not a “fragment” in all nature,
for every relative fragment of one thing
is a full harmonious unit in itself.
John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
Complete
We do not have to have everything sorted out in our lives for them to be complete and us to be happy.
A lot of disappointed people have been left
standing on the street corner
waiting for the bus marked Perfection
Donald Kennedy
photo kai hendry
