I'm often in the woods. When my body can't go there, my mind does. During this particular visit, I'm bushwhacking, and brush is thick and visibility is low. When vines yield, the feet can take some steps somewhere. Nearby and in the distance, others are hacking away as well. Their trails are straight and segmented with sharp edges, meandering and serpentine, or in perfect circles. Some are hacking in place.
In a situation such as this, there is something that can facilitate both movement and inertia. It is the tricky thing that brought me to this woodland in the first place, and it is called perfection.
The desire to perfect, to embark on the noble process of perfecting, is a characteristic that makes us humans dynamic, constantly moving, growing. Perfection as a process is life-affirming, and perfection as a goal, always to be almost met somewhere in the future, can easily become disabling.
Perfection is an ism when it is paralyzing, fear-inducing, when it convinces us to develop judgements and comparisons of ourselves and others, and when it loses us in the woods. I thought this old frenemy was behind me, frozen in my younger years of refusing to sleep until that short film was edited perfectly down to the frame. It resurfaced as I worked on my first Ruby on Rails application, inviting me to hone in on a single feature, a single piece of logic, a single abstraction, until it was flawless, and when coming back out of that fever, to forget why I was doing what I was doing. Perhaps in the confines of the world's 1s and 0s, there is such a thing as a perfect product, but likely not in its fluid, non-programmatic facets. In these dimensions, in art, who am I to know what perfect looks like? The ability to persist until I achieve flawless logic is admirable, but perhaps even more so is the art of letting go of an elusive ideal. So I had to learn that the following practices are not weaknesses, but great strengths: