It’s Important to Be Imperfect
Too many of us are walking around with a misguided layer of judgment aimed at our own choices or actions or the actions and choices of others. I say “misguided” because I believe the intention to be technically “good.” We want to get things right. We want to be better.
But it’s also this layer of evaluation that almost always is the culprit behind poor mental health or psychological distress, because inevitably the fantasy of what is right or better doesn’t align with the reality of experience. It doesn’t jive with good enough.
Humans are wonderful storytellers. We come up with the most incredibly rich, lovely, enthralling stories… except when those stories are aimed at ourselves or others in real life. We do a lot of epically bad prediction analysis. Our internal algorithms are busted.
We are never right when it comes to our predictions and we make the BLEEPIEST weather people (weather people? Is that where we have landed?) when trying to predict clear and sunny days or BLEEPstorms full of hail.
Unfortunately, in our efforts to make ourselves feel better by trying to control or predict others, that behavior tends to make things much worse. It’s stressful being wrong all the time. It’s annoying when people don’t do what we want or fall short of our expectations.
I am reading Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity, which is already an exceptional book on partnership in modern America. I highly recommend it, and I’ve only just started. In it, she quotes Tony Robbins, who said, “Passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.” The reality is that’s true of life in general, not just when it comes to intercourse. That sentiment can be expanded to “passion in life is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.”
Put another way, it seems really important to get to a place where we fall in love with life’s uncertainty, and I don’t think any of us can get there without faith.
Faith, to me, is the opposite of anxiety. It is the opposite of Oh no! What’s going to happen now?! It is the calm before, in the eye of, and after the storm. It is acceptance of whatever is, and will be, and has been, and the search for the joy or lesson in all of it. It is our wisest self, sitting in the seat of our soul, telling ourselves it’s going to be okay when hardship looms large and arrives.
I like to imagine it’s like the sun: life-giving, warmth and vitality for all, ever steady, ever present, even as dark arrives and fades. It is whatever we need it to be in an ever-changing life.
There was a time when the faintest kerfuffle scared me. There was a time in my life when uncertainty felt almost unbearable. But that is fading and being replaced by something much brighter and more permanent. I am starting to default to being excited about whatever comes next. I feel capable of sustained growth, of discipline, of consistency and change. I feel the best in life is in store for me even as I stumble and falter.
Part of having faith is feeling worthy of love and life and all the good things life has to offer in spite of or perhaps because we are imperfect. Allowing ourselves the occasional screw up, whether trivial or massive, is part of having faith. Failures and challenges become part of the process, like building resilience in children. We all have to learn how to persevere, but not all of us do. Faith is about perseverance. It is about resilience.
It is about assuming that there is a useful lesson in a hardship or broken heart. It is about seeking meaning and purpose in the day-to-day and throughout life. It is about epic failures and missed chances and forging on as if there is more and better and even wonderful on the other side.