Perfection in Life
by Elizabeth Kanabe
Perfection – it's something that we all strive for. We desire the perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect job, the perfect life. Ask someone to describe their perfect meal, and it might be homemade Italian pasta and meatballs, with the sauce nice and thick, the garlic bread just crispy enough, the salad fresh. Someone's perfect date? Maybe flowers, dinner, drinks and a midnight walk on the beach. The perfect day? Waking late to breakfast in bed, working in the garden to their favorite music, sipping iced tea on a warm spring day and reading without being disturbed. Those seem simple enough to state and even measure against ideals.
But what about the perfect job, kids, life? Those are a little more complicated. We can state the traits that a "perfect" job might have: flexible hours, not too much stress, growth potential, decent pay, time off for soccer games. For a parent the perfect child might be one who is friendly, smart, stays off drugs, goes to college and lives a good life. A perfect life to one person is making it big in Hollywood, to another living in the country, to another working on Wall Street. But the difference with these examples is that they are not simple, single measurements in time.
Life, kids, the job might be perfect at any point in time, and not so at other times. We have stress in our lives, we are not in control all of the time, but does that mean that we don't have the perfect life? How can we tell if we do, and can we ever have the perfect life? Or would that require it to be perfect all of the time with no flaws?
Just looking at our lives, we can basically look at where we are, where we have been, and if we are on track for the future. We are able to tell if we are happy or not, if we are achieving goals along the way, and if we are excited about what the future holds. So a better way to look at life is not whether or not it's "perfect" as measured by a set of check-lists. That question holds no true meaning by itself. It is better to look at the way we live life, the values that we hold, and HOW we live rather than what the circumstances in our life is at any point in time.
An example of this is looking at the perfect life as the old cliché from the 50's. The perfect life was a marriage, the father working a sensible job, the wife being the stay at home mom, two kids, a dog, and a white picket fence and house in the suburbs. The modern version of this might be a successful husband, children who stay out of trouble and go to college, the house, the nice car, the yearly vacations and a retirement at 65. But the problem with simply having these "check-list" goals in life is that life might not be great before you have those things, and it might not even be great after you have them. So we have the Hollywood actress who is addicted to drugs, we have the housewife who is having an affair, the rich kids who always seem to get into trouble, despite their 'perfect' lives. Yet we see someone living a quite humble life extremely happy.
If instead we look at our life's overall themes and how things progress, we get a truer sense of if it is going well. Instead of just waiting for "marriage" as a set point in time, we can learn to appreciate a healthy, loving relationship at all stages. Though we may not yet be at our dream job, we can appreciate the small, horrible start-up jobs that will lead us to that job as pathways instead of failures. We can learn to appreciate children for who they are every day, not just always waiting for the next big event in their life. By looking at life in this way, we can be quite happy with how things are progressing before we reach our milestone goals. It will also prevent us from focusing so much on certain goals, from putting so much faith in those accomplishments, that once achieved we don't know where to go next.
By taking the focus away from these "non-active", non-moving targets, we can appreciate and enjoy the process of life. We can enjoy working for that promotion and later enjoy knowing that we've deserved it. If it was simply a goal to become CEO of a corporation, without regards to how you become CEO, a person may not see the difference between lying and cheating their way to the position as opposed to working for it. The person who focused only on the goal and saw no difference in the paths to getting there may not understand why they are living the life they thought was the ideal, but are not enjoying it as they thought they would.
Being happy with your life doesn't mean that you can't have regrets from the past, or fear for the future. Evaluating your life by accomplishments, the path that you are traveling on and the advancements toward your goals allows for a better understanding of your happiness and satisfaction in life. It also allows you to change your mind about what you want in life, as well as prepare to better deal with what might come up along the way.
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