I was wrestling with a jar of sauerkraut for minutes this morning. I really wanted sauerkraut for breakfast. Or rather, I had sauerkraut and I really wanted breakfast. After much wrestling and the application of a silicon oven mitt, I managed to spill kraut juice all over the kitchen floor. Not such a bad smell. This scene fit nicely with my meditations on the nature of the ideal, of ideal things, of ideal environments and actions. I have for a long time disclaimed any possibility that I’m a “perfectionist”. Another ist/ism that I wanted no part of. The problem is that I have striven to match my realities with a theoretical ideal that I don’t have a clear picture of so vigorously as to alienate myself from people and from myself. It would be so convenient to look to my father’s exhortation on the way out the door to school every morning, “Be good to the people you meet”. I’ve just been trying to be ideal, to be good, to everyone I meet. But he didn’t do the narrating and neurosifying of the impossible mission to create an unclear ideal in relationships, in work, in myself (though he always had a lot of questions the two or three times I got a B in school). I have crashed out of so many environments after worshipping an ideal that I couldn’t articulate and beating my head against the wall when it wasn’t realized (or developing coping mechanisms for the extended mediocrity that lightly tortured me). The answer is not to press harder for perfection. The appropriate response is to rethink this impossible mission. I may as well be intending to colonize Mars and the asteroid belt, re-make society, and answer all the unanswered questions of philosophy, all while trying to raise seven children (homeschooled, of course). Such an egoistic method to the madness of life; to claim sole possession of sanity and seek to cure the whole place from the inside. Nonsense. It’s using a yardstick that doesn’t exist trying to measure a football field on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in a kayak.
So what to do about this now-clearly overpowering istishness toward perfection? Something about rejecting it. Something about leaving the kitchen a mess. Something about not having gotten groceries in a long time and being comfortable in the sauerkraut, accepting even when I can’t get it open. To accept more screw-ups, to ask less of everything and everyone, to grasp less tightly onto concepts. It’s good to know this expectations machine is running. While I may not be able to throw enough sand into it to grind it to a halt immediately, I can start examining it and seeing its mode of operation. And perhaps reduce the self-propagated, sustainably fueled, crash-heavy machine to just another flower in the garden.
Roman Ryan 