Browsing Category: "Perfectly Imperfect"
It was one of those beautiful winter days. You know, the ones where the temperature is finally high enough that your nose doesn’t freeze the moment it ventures beyond the cozy warmth of your home and all around fat snowflakes are silently drifting down, covering everything around you in a blanket of white.
It was a day like this when I found the most perfect snowflake I have ever seen.
As I strolled through the snow, enjoying the falling snow, I saw it drift down and land on my sleeve. It was the most beautiful of all the snowflakes that day. Perfectly balanced and intricately designed, it perched there for a moment while I gazed upon it. And then, it melted.
The fragile beauty of this perfect snowflake could not exist in the warmth of my sleeve. Nor would it have survived had it joined the other snowflakes that reached the ground, for even in it’s perfection, it was imperfect. Its intricate shape would have been lost, compressed by the blanket of snow still falling.
For one moment in time, I looked upon perfection and found it to be perfectly imperfect.
One of the hardest things a person can do is to give up the idea of being perfect and accept that we are all perfectly imperfect. Perfection is after all an unachievable goal that is often defined by another’s ideal of perfection.
While we focus on what another thinks or believes, we avoid taking stock of who we are and who we wish to become. Yes, we are imperfect by the standards of some. But it is our own standard of the person we want to be that we must live up to.
So how do you achieve in your own mind an acceptance of your perfectly imperfect self?
Begin by listing the many strengths that you possess. Ahhh now I’m sure that you thought it would be weaknesses, not strengths that would be listed first. We are all generally quite good at enumerating our weaknesses. We have had a lot of practice doing so daily for most of our lives. So instead, this time, we will begin by listing our strengths, as this is a much harder task.
Life is perfectly imperfect is it not? Quite frankly I think it would be rather boring if it were not. We humans thrive on challenge and adversity. We grow and sharpen as we are forged on the anvil of life. And how we grow is different for each of us.
Inspiration for writing comes from the strangest places. A recent conversation with a co-worker lead to a discussion of how people cope with challenge life presents them. Someone we knew had just given birth to twins.
From there, the conversation went to how people handle challenges like caring for twins or a child with challenges or some other challenge in our perfectly imperfect lives. The conclusion being, they just do. That’s just life.
Each of us is given our own successes and challenges to meet. Those given to us would not be right for another, but somehow they are right for us. They provide the opportunity for us to learn and grow through the ways we choose to accept and meet them. And they seldom arrive, as we would have envisioned. Instead they find us along the perfectly imperfect path we follow in life.
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We are all perfectly imperfect. Have you ever met someone who in your opinion was perfect? If you have, we’ll bet you dollars to donuts, if you told them this, they would have a laundry list of imperfections to reveal.
Imperfection is what makes each person unique in this perfectly imperfect world. Some imperfections can be changed, while others can not be changed. It is how you perceive yourself in light of those imperfections and how you chose to meet the challenges they present that either enhances or detracts from the quality of the life you lead.
Did you know that what many believe is an imperfection in their self, is considered to be the unique quality that makes them special to another? Novelists have a field day playing on imperfections to bring their characters to life and allow us to relate to them. Take this perfectly imperfect character from Tom Clancy’s Netforce – Hidden Agendas as a for instance….
