Saturday, December 6, 2014

The Beauty of Imperfection


Many Native American cultures have a practice of intentionally introducing mistakes or errors into man made objects. From Navajo rugs to Huron pottery to Tlingit carvings, these small, sometimes almost unnoticeable flaws, are a way of honoring Creator by declaring that only He is able to make something perfect. Yet, His greatest work, creation itself, is filled with imperfection.


Human Beings strive for perfection in so many things. This is especially apparent in how we tend to our own appearance.  We will subject ourselves to such things as smearing our faces and imbuing our hair with chemicals intended to cover imperfections and control the natural unruliness of our bodies. We now have software which can quickly eliminate imperfections and even make us look thinner and/or change our eye color and skin tone to make us appear more perfect. We seek out surgeons to cut away or alter parts of our bodies we find imperfect.

We are the only species on earth so dissatisfied with the way things are about ourselves that we do physical harm to ourselves to correct imperfections.

Nature is not perfect. Even those elements of nature which are the closest to being perfectly formed-mineral crystals and snow flakes-still display minute imperfections. Natural fractals (things such as a young fern or a nautilus shell) are  as close to "perfect" as living organisms can be, but still have imperfections.

Why do we want to surround ourselves with perfection, even to the point of altering our bodies? We could say it's pride, and that would be part of the answer. However I think it goes beyond pride into seeking a sense of safety. Here is what I think.

 Perfection symbolizes an absence of disease or destructive forces. It subconsciously places a barrier up against death and decay. It leads the viewer of the perfection into a place of safe perception, that tells the inner child that nothing bad is going to happen. It indicates the ultimate in growth and security, the unassailable state in which the perfect thing is superior to anything lacking perfection, and is therefore immune to the ravages of aging, death and decay.



It's all terribly unnatural.  The demand or expectation of Perfection implies that both growth and aging are unwanted aspects of living. Perfection is static, unchanging. Ergo it is also dead, it's lifelessness indicated by the lack of any signs of growth or decay, both of which are necessary for life. Fixation on perfection is actually a fixation on death, the death of stasis. That which does not change is dead, no matter how beautiful and alive it may appear.

We dismiss imperfect objects such as flowers from our lives because they are not beautiful enough. That lack, however, is not within the flower, but within our own capacity to appreciate that the imperfect flower is honest. Nature simply does not produce perfection, owing to the fact that there is such an infinite number of variations in life that natural perfection is impossible.

Yet we want to maintain the illusion, the lie of perfection because in it we find the safety of denying our own imperfectness. This lack of perfection is inherent in everything from the fact that we age, change and die, to noses that are a bit too big, or ears that stick out from our heads, or the asymmetry found in every human being's face. These changes and imperfections can appear chaotic to us, disturbing the safety of order and predictability. We want things to be perfect because that allows us a sense that we are in control of things that we really can't control. We dislike imperfection because we fear the death and chaos which it symbolizes.

As an example consider how we use flowers for decoration, but insist on flowers that are "perfect".  Those "perfect" flowers in a vase are already dead, and will eventually wither away. In seeking to maintain the illusion of perfect beauty, as a subconscious effort to deny the reality of death, we have actually brought death into our presence.  We can try artificial flowers, but those are even more indicative of death because they were never alive. Pots of living flowers are no better, as the simply display their natural "imperfection" by going through the cycle of life as they always do.



The very fact that the beauty of flowers is so fleeting, so temporal, should tell us that beauty, as far as creation is concerned, is not a permanent state of life. Nor should it be, because if beauty existed without change, we would take it for granted and appreciate it far less. Imperfection is the provenance that life involves both growth and decay, the achievement of beauty and its loss, the promise that youth must progress into adulthood, and adulthood into death, because to be stuck at any one point in the cycle of life is actually a form of death in itself.

Another aspect of imperfection in nature is that it's often imposed by an outside force. A lovely flower is chewed by insects, marring it's assumed beauty. Yet those scars tell us that the flower has participated in the Circle of Life by providing sustenance for other creatures. We consider them pests, but nature considers them part of an entire cycle of life, one aspect of the unfathomably complex organism that is our Earth Mother. We are just one part of that living being, our earth, yet we presume to dictate what is beautiful and perfect and right based on our own self-centered perspective.

I've learned to not only appreciate, but in many ways prefer imperfection. It reminds me that my own imperfections, whether inherent or the result of growing older, are natural. They are as Creator intends things to be. Imperfections in nature are reassurances that having them in my own life is normal, nothing to be feared or avoided. Rather my own imperfections are to be put in proper place, accepted as part of who I am. Perhaps some of my imperfections are even a mark of beauty in their own right, indicating growth in an area of my life that would otherwise by static and lifeless.

In any regards, I know that since Creator allows imperfection in the rest of creation, yet still declares it all to be good, then my own imperfections don't give Him cause to reject me. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is perfectly beautiful.

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