Perfection.
It is a tyrant. It is an overlord. It comes with a really hard gaze and a sneer. Kind of looms over your shoulder. Sometimes it doesn't really have to say much of anything. It's just this sort of looming, dark presence.
Give perfection some credit. It's there to try to get us to do things. Make sure though we do it well. Make sure we hit the standard. But man, it can be a fascist.
And I have rebelled against this fascist. Refusing to go on with whatever it is that it's compelling me to do. Put down the pen, as it were. That'll show them, right? That's the seeds of procrastination. Then comes some deadline and it's a scramble. And it feels like this task, like an unchecked box. And we push hard to drive through it. And it's not pleasant.
I was poking around for some thoughts around perfectionism. And I came across one from the philosopher Will Durant. I think this is his antidote to perfectionism. Durant wrote:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
I like that. I'd like to add one more thing to that. What if my sitting there wasn't an act of rebellion coming out of anger and coming out of petulance? What if it was in service to reclaiming space and to reclaiming openness ... to just being, so that the activity can just flow.
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