You are perfect. I mean it. And not in a stereotypical American way of heaping praise on people to make them feel better about themselves. If your immediate response to this is, “nobody’s perfect”, this is what most people say, because we have been taught that we all have our weaknesses and must work on them or at least hide them if we are ever to: get into a good school, find a good job, attract a mate and live up to our potential.
For those who believe in God or gods, not being perfect is at once both motivating (to atone through the church/temple) and discouraging (because only God is perfect and you can never be). While this may help attendance at weekly service, it’s important to remember that at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created us in His own image. Not only does this make us perfect, it makes each one of us creators of our own universe, just like Him.
If you believe that because of a talking snake, you were born into sin (the ultimate imperfection), I hope this post will cheer you up.
For the sake of neutrality, let’s just call being perfect your expression of connectedness with the universe and with everything in it. Everything on this planet was created in the same way, from the same chemical building blocks and systems. The tree, the moose, the jellyfish, your boss and all of us are made up of the same elemental stuff. As beings, we are not broken nor in need of fixing. Even genetic abnormalities are part of how the universe experiments through mutation. We are perfect expressions of our evolutionary (or intelligent designed) past.
The big reason why most of us can’t accept perfection is that our cultures have applied subjective and artificial standards of beauty, intelligence and success which we unconsciously accept. By society’s standards, we’re born into imperfection, and that really is a sin. To accept this means that the universe has put us into a game where the rules are stacked against us from the beginning. It means we’ll never be clever enough, fit enough, handsome enough, slim enough, patient enough or pious enough. We’ll always come up short.
As I wrote in Getting & Spending, Materialism is no different than any other religion. It needs a congregation, and advertising is its liturgy. Its ritual of consumerism is driven by convincing you of your imperfections and promoting ways you can minimize or fix them by buying products. This creates anxiety and low self-esteem, as we are constantly reminded of how imperfect we are, especially when compared to computer and surgically enhanced “real people” with our dandruff, fat asses, and outdated products. It also leaves us feeling disappointed, as Margaret Cho points out, buying “turnaround cream that doesn’t turnaround shit.”
Not measuring up to what we believe are God’s or others’ expectations puts us under stress. This often manifests as guilt. If you’re Jewish or Catholic, you know what I’m talking about. I come from a Jewish/Catholic background, so I’ll see you and raise you. When we’re under stress, we react out of fear, without considering all the options available to us. Looking at things as perfect on the other hand, allows us infinite choice on how we want to approach a problem. When we acknowledge perfection, we allow ourselves to act not from pressure, shame or guilt, but from a place of freedom.
One of my management students once asked me, “If I’m perfect, why do I have to take this training class?”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “There are only two things anyone ‘has to’ do: die someday, and occupy space wherever you are. That’s it. Everything else is choice. So if you’re perfect, you can choose to expand your mind, learn a new skill, be anyone, or do something you’ve never done. If you’re not satisfied with the outcome (though it is still perfect, just not by your definition), you can respond any way you want, without stress, pressure or out of knee-jerk habit.”
“I’d rather be out playing golf than sitting here in a classroom with my boss,” he added. I encouraged him to weigh the benefits & consequences of the choice, and to recognize that it was still a valid choice.
“Maybe you’d shoot a perfect game,” I said. The point is that when we look at ourselves and the world from a presupposition of perfection, we can act because we choose to, not because we have to or because something’s “wrong” and we need to “fix” it.
Something is always going according to plan, just not necessarily our plan. Whenever we act from pressure or stress, the result is rarely satisfactory. When we act from freedom, we tend to make better choices, in terms of helping us achieve eventual desired results.
What does it feel like to be perfect? Well, your behavior is a perfect expression of your emotions: you’d never punch someone in the face when you’re feeling happy. And your emotions are a perfect manifestation of how you interpret things. Your interpretations are a perfect model of the beliefs you have. Trees are perfectly crooked, one foot perfectly bigger than the other.
My wife and I are in our 40’s, and are expecting a baby. We have foregone the amniosenthesis that could determine if our baby has any birth defects (and would give us reason to abort it if we discovered them). Our belief (and we’re not religious people) is that no matter how the baby turns out, he or she will be perfect. Our baby doesn’t need to measure up to anyone’s standard of beauty, intelligence or anything else for that matter. He or she will just be exactly as she was created to be.
I remember seeing Eero Saarinen’s Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis, where he set the giant cross above the altar deliberately askew, as if to remind us that only God can build something perfect. I’m sure this played well with the Lutherans that commissioned Saarinen, to remind their congregation of the need to be humble before God. Yet I would argue that by not acknowledging our perfect likeness to God’s image is to forget our place in the creative power of the universe in which each of us plays a part.
“Whether or not it is clear to you,” goes the wonderful poem, Desiderata, “no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” In other words, it’s all perfect.