Seeking perfection

Whenever you think that things have worked out the way you wanted something weird happens… who can identify with this sentence? Well, I guess everyone can. I’ve been talking about this to friends of mine and it seems that life is especially hard to those who always seek perfection. Before I continue, let me just clarify what I mean with perfection: being absolutely happy with something/someone/a situation.

What could this perfection be about? Could it be having a nice job, a well-working relationship, reliable friends, a happy family, a well-shaped body, a good state of health … and oh, well, all at the same time? At least these are some of the topics that most of us deal with all the time.

Sometimes some areas work out better, sometimes the other ones do… so why can’t we just accept this fact and keep on going? No matter what we do it doesn’t seem to be enough, neither enough for ourselves nor for others.

Is there a way out?

Well, either we manage perfection or we just accept things as they are… let us look at the first option: perfection. Why will this never work out? It’s easy: because what is perfect for you might not be perfect for others. As long as your perfection is dependent on others you will never reach it. And this is also the conclusion I came to: you can only claim perfection on yourself, your love-life and your closest friends. Because these are areas that are directly influenced by you. Becoming the person you want to be is something that is influenced only by you. And your partner and your closest friends are also chosen by you only, so here you can also seek for your own self-defined perfection.

But what about the rest? What about other people in your life? What about your colleagues at work? What about your sports club? Will it ever be possible to have everything the way you want it? Of course not. The people I was describing before (your partner and your closest friends) are the ones who want to make you happy, they want things to work out with you. But all the rest doesn’t care… maybe some do but then you should rather be happy about any additional situation that makes you happy rather than asking yourself why so many things are not the way you want them to be. And here we end up at the second option I described above: accept things as they are.

There is a very good exercise I learned at a training course, it’s actually something some kind of Guru used to do, if I find out the source, I’ll add it. So you take a couple of chickpeas, let’s say 10 and put them in your left pocket in the morning. Every time something good happens you put one of these chickpeas in your right pocket and in the end of the day you take them out and try to figure out again why they went to the right pocket. Then you put them back again and re-start the next morning.

Conclusion? The essence of this is easy, it’s accepting things as they are and appreciating everything good that happens in your life rather than asking life to be perfect and complaining about situations that don’t work out for you. Eckhart Tolle also has some nice views of this in his book “The Power of Now” (I know I keep on talking about this constantly). But for sure having this attitude in today’s world is something that needs a lot of exercise. And the funny thing is that once we change our attitude more and more good things will happen as Pierre Franckh describes in this book “The Law of Resonance”. No matter if you believe in these things or not, trust me it’s worth trying.