Perfection

As I was driving home the other day after running some errands (one of which was to pay a bill that would otherwise be late) I was thinking…. Why do I do that? Why would I wait until the last minute to pay a bill that I could easily have popped into the mail a couple of weeks earlier? The silliness of it struck me. And then, a memory jumped to mind. Many, many years earlier, in elementary school, we were learning about Native American Indians. There was a tribe, the Navajo I think, that were famous for their exquisite weaving. But, they would always make a mistake in the weaving; if not by accident, then on purpose, because to be perfect was considered arrogance, or impertinence, towards the gods. It must have stuck with me in some corner of my mind for all of these years. Is this why I do silly little things that make my own life more difficult; because I don’t want to “be too perfect”? Because if I were it would tempt disaster?

I see this tendency in myself and others all the time. Life can be going along smoothly and fabulously then suddenly, like the emergency break just got yanked, there is a senseless act of self sabotage that interrupts the wonderful fluid forward flow. There is a term I have heard used for this phenomenon. It is “de-evolution”.

Why does this happen? Is it because it takes so much energy to keep “it” all together; like holding multiple beach balls below the surface of a pool? Is it because we somehow fear being perfect? Or maybe because we want to be seen and recognized and loved for who we are as people rather than for what we look like or the job we do. Most likely it is some combination of these, and other reasons. We are all so unique, so different….and I will hazard a guess that the “cure” for this phenomenon is as unique as the experience.

For me, maybe the cure is to slow down, smell the flowers, enjoy the sunshine, and to get more joy out of the little things in life, including paying pills. As for any lingering fears of perfection (ha ha), now that I am aware of that idea, I can use NLP to rewrite that, up ’til now subconscious, internal dialogue.