In the Medusa and the Snail, a classic collection of observations about the marvels of the natural world, biologist Lewis Thomas includes an insightful essay on DNA called “The Wonderful Mistake.” In that essay, Thomas writes:
We know a lot about DNA, but if our kind of mind had been confronted with the problem of designing a similar replicating molecule from scratch, we’d never have succeeded. We would have made one fatal mistake: our molecule would have been perfect. The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute we could still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
Thomas goes on to add “To err is human, we say, but we don’t like the idea much, and it’s harder still to accept the fact that erring is biological.”
Approaching this question of imperfection from a more artistic and spiritual perspective, musician and poet Leonard Cohen, in his classic song “Anthem,” writes:
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Commenting on these famous lyrics, songwriter Leonard Cohen once told an interviewer “This life is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything.” “Worse still,” he adds, ‘there is a crack in everything that you can put together:” Nevertheless, he says, it is in the crack “where the resurrection is, and the return and the repentance… in our confrontation with the brokenness of things.”
Just as Lewis Thomas reminds us that our very existence is predicated on DNA’s capacity for making mistakes, Leonard Cohen urges us to value life’s inevitable imperfection for the good of our souls. Even so, resistance to even a grudging acceptance of imperfection runs deep in almost all of us.
That said, the idea that the world is inherently flawed is deeply embedded in many of the world’s spiritual traditions. In the Bible’s first story, for example, we are told that God created an orderly world out of primordial chaos, a monumental project which is said to have taken six days. At the end of that sixth day of creation, according to this Biblical account, “God saw everything that he had made and beheld that it was very good.” Although there are multiple Hebrew words meaning perfect, unspoiled, or flawless, none of those were the words ascribed to God’s evaluation of his creation. Good, even very good, is not the same thing as perfect.
Speaking about the Christian scripture, theologian Kathleen Norris points out that the word in the New Testament commonly translated as “perfect” is really a mistranslation. She says the Greek word used by the Gospel writers and Paul was “telos,” a word which does not mean perfect, but rather “complete, entire, full-grown.” To be perfect in this original sense, Norris tell us, “is to make room for growth, for the changes that bring us to maturity, to ripeness,” rather than our modern notion of that which is without flaw.
And drawing on Buddhist wisdom about imperfection, Unitarian Universalist minister Meg Barnhouse writes of a photograph entitled, “Broken Buddha.” It shows the lap of a painted Buddha statue. One hand is broken off, resting on the sole of an upturned foot. Barnhouse writes that she is drawn to that image because it shows the Enlightened One as imperfect, cracked, and chipped. She says, “Maybe that’s how my enlightenment feels. It’s not all that shiny anymore. The Broken Buddha tells me I don’t have to be scared of being the way I am. The broken Buddha tells me that life is not neat. The Broken Buddha says he knows how I feel.”
Ultimately, as New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen tell us, the really hard work is giving up on being perfect and focusing instead on becoming ourselves. This is particularly difficult work, she adds, because there is neither a guidebook nor a roadmap to being yourself. Don’t try to be what the world tells you to be, she advises. Whether we live by the Eightfold Path, the Ten commandments, the Twelve Steps, or any other spiritual code or program, Quindlen reminds us that we can still wind up feeling like a failure if the end result isn’t compassionately accepting ourselves as we are in this moment.
Addressing the challenge of embracing imperfection from a related perspective, psychologist and spiritual teacher Joan Borysenko advises us to “acknowledge the impossibility of perfection and try to attain authenticity instead.” Doing so requires a constant effort to stay present, maintain our center, and dare to honestly tell the truth about what we’re thinking and feeling. Being fully present allows us to make choices which bring us into alignment with our deepest, most authentic selves. As Borysenko sagely concludes, this process of seeking greater authenticity rather than pointlessly striving for perfection, “is the only kind of perfectionism worth practicing.”