Quick… name the opposite.
Dark…
Tall…
Fast…
Can lightness exist if there is no darkness? Can tall exist if no one is short? Can slow be up for comparison if there is no fast?
Continuums can only exist if there is a place to go on the other side and if there are stops in between.
And so when I ask you to name the opposite of this word…
Imperfect…
What comes to mind?
Did you think Perfect?
And, yet, don’t we know that there is no perfect? That perfect is an idea and not a truth. That perfect is simply employed to sell us a bag of goods.
Here is the deal: a model or actress walks into a photo shoot. After hours in make-up, hair, and styling, she hits the set where the lighting and conditions have been made mostly right. I say mostly because things don’t stop there with great make-up, hair, and styling. After that photo shoot wraps, that photo is transformed into an image. What? What makes a photo an image? A whole lotta photoshopping that makes it inappropriate and even false advertising to call it a photo anymore.
And why are these photos manipulated in such extreme ways? Well, if you ask me, it’s because if we buy into what we’re being shown, we will constantly need to consume. Because we’re trying to reach the standards shown to us in the photos and we don’t always realize just how untrue these photos are. So we chase what they show us, never realizing that what we are being shown isn’t even real. It is a fairy tale. There is, truly in this case, no perfect. Perfect does not exist.
But it is not just that perfect doesn’t exist because there is photoshopping. Perfect also does not exist because it would buy into the idea that there is just one way to look.
But there is not just one way to look. If there were, then we would not have been designed to be such unique, individual beings. We would have been designed more uniformly. And we are so not. Put two identical twins beside each other and they even have their nuances of uniqueness.
Humanity, you see, wasn’t mass produced. We are each individual works of art. We are unique sculptures. We are our own masterpieces. We are like our fingerprints, snowflakes, as novel as the tinkling of our unique laughter.
And so here’s the thing that we all know, that we hear ourselves say sometimes but maybe have never really registered, “THERE IS NO PERFECT.”
Given that, let’s flip that on its side.
If there is no perfect, there is no imperfect, either.
Perfect is a farce, designed to make us yearn for something different and, if we do that, then we’re constantly consuming, right. Maybe this diet will make me thin enough. Maybe this mascara will make my lashes lush enough. Maybe this bronzer will make me glow enough. If we’re chasing perfect, there’s always another step we can take.
You only have to ask yourself who benefits from our belief that perfect can exist and we must reach it to understand that it is a trap.
But imperfect is just as much of a farce. If we feel we are imperfect, we yearn just as much, we chase just as much, we spend just as much energy and time and money on getting to perfect.
You only have to ask yourself who benefits from our belief that we are imperfect and must do something about it to understand that it is a trick.
So, here’s the truth.
There is no perfect. There is no imperfect. We are each uniquely made to be our divine expression. That is no accident. That is no mistake. We are divine as we are.
