Perfect Just the Way You Are
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett
You are perfect just the way you are. Mistakes and imperfections are part of our ordinary, vulnerable, human life. Dōgen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen, talked about “succeeding wrong with wrong” (shoshaku jushaku) or fixing a mistake with another mistake. Shunryu Suzuki, the writer of one of Zen classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, famously said that this phrase reflected a zen master as having a life of “one continuous mistake”.
Basically, all of this means that we can never learn anything if we don’t make mistakes. Even if it means making mistake after mistake. We are all like zen masters – we screw up again and again until we eventually learn something. Making these mistakes is key to learning.
We can learn by accepting our imperfections and vulnerabilities, which we often see as ‘mistakes’ that we need to ‘correct’. We want to be a ‘better’ version of ourselves. Whatever that means!
It is important not to be down on ourselves when we make mistakes in our personal lives, to be able to forgive ourselves, and let go of the stuff that can keep us bogged down if we keep reliving our past mistakes over and over again. This doesn’t mean that we forget about them. It simply means that we learn from them and move on, vowing never again to make the same mistake twice. This is our practice.
We can compare it to the judo artist who learns to fall properly. We can learn from every fall, embracing them and seeing life as a process of learning how to fall over and over again. Yet each time we can pick ourselves up off the floor and start over, promising ourselves never to fall again in the same way.
The Zen approach is not about avoiding mistakes, but bringing our errors to the path. Making a mistake opens the tenderness in us and can be more helpful than not making one. Robert Reese
Life is one continuous mistake because that’s life!
Wabi-Sabi
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is a beautiful way of looking at our imperfections.
Wabi-sabi celebrates imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence, corrosion and decay – the beauty of a mouldy prayer flag; a worn ornament, a chip or crack in a vase – all making the objects more interesting and more real in the beauty of their imperfection. It celebrates the handmade items that are not mass-produced in all their earthiness and non-purity. We celebrate this artform by accepting things just the way they are, without wanting them to be different, perfect, or whole.
Our practice should also celebrate our imperfections – our willingness to accept ourselves as we are, imperfections and mistakes included.
Things that exist are imperfect. Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in that imperfection is perfect reality. Shunryu Suzuki
Kintsugi Art
The art form of kintsugi embraces the spirit of wabi-sabi by putting broken pottery back together again, highlighting the cracks and joins with gold. They become more appreciated and more valuable because of their imperfections by highlighting the cracks and scars of their repair.
So too can we appreciate our own lives by embracing our so-called imperfections, weaknesses and failures. In doing this we celebrate our wholeness, our unique beauty and our resilience. We are not broken. We are the perfection of who we already are, complete with all our faults and blemishes. We pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and we make something beautiful out of this. As Rumi wrote : “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
In this way, kintsugi embraces authenticity and imperfections creating, in turn, a stronger, more beautiful and resilient piece of art. As Korean Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in “No Mud, No Lotus,” If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses.
What a beautiful way to think about our lives!
