Perfectly Imperfect

The sooner we come to accept that we are all imperfect, that we are not always right, that we make mistakes and can be less than ideal in our choices, attitudes, desires and actions, the better we will be at being imperfect.

The better we will be at being... ahh! HUMAN.

It's kinda cool to be a human, stumbling along in the darkness, one foot in front of the other, occasional flashes of insight and vision-- like walking a country road in the middle of a midnight thunder storm. Frightening and dangerous, but thrilling.

It's so easy to be afraid of the darkness-- it's the unknown, the always-potential for the unexpected. The night hunters live there, and so do the pebbles that twist your ankle and bring you to your knees. But in the darkness are the stars, and the sound of the crickets, and the cool dew, the silvery light of the moon that makes everything gentle.

So what if we can accept the darkness inside of ourselves-- hurtling toward self destructiveness and apathy, destroying our own dreams ourselves because of the unknown that could come, the critics, the mistakes, the failures-- and also, strangely, the success, the love, the joy.

All that is unknown, too, and sometimes more scary than failure. It's much safer to stay where everything is familiar and known-- manicured and domesticated. That's where life is comfortable, where we have sanitized all the wildness and dark potential from it. Safe, comfortable because it is all planned out and set. A clear road, straight down the middle. We think everything will be predictable, no danger, no shocks-- heh, heh, like life is ever predictable.

Choosing to leave secure teaching for an unknown career in the arts was a wide-open, light of day choice. I knew that I was heading into a thing that challenged me, where I didn't feel secure, where the outcome was unknown. But I faced the knowledge that there was something wild and untamed inside of me that the rules and have-to's of the board of ed did not value. I valued it, more than I valued following somebody else's rules. And I also faced the knowledge that it was my fear that I wasn't good enough that kept me from diving whole-heartedly into art and writing.

That's the fear of the unknown. The darkness.

Maybe we try to keep the light and the dark too separate from eachother. We choke our lives with rules and boundaries, trying to keep it known and accepted and understood, and we run from the darkness back to the safety.

Maybe what we need to do is to try and illuminate the darkness in our lives, shine the light into it and begin to understand what it is this pain and unknown is made of. Maybe we also need to allow some of the darkness into our manicured lives. Like compost, the rotting bones of what we discard, it can only make our lives richer and deeper.

There's nothing wrong with order. There's also nothing wrong with wildness and imperfection. We're made of both, and the more we try to ignore and reject one or the other, maybe the less whole and imperfectly complete we are.