Living Surrendering Perfection and Allowing Our Spiritual Lives
by Allie Rowbottom
Poetess Mary Oliver writes in her Wild Geese, "you do not have to be good/you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting/you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves"
This poem is a pivotal part of my everyday life. It hangs from the refrigerator held up by a giant banana shaped magnet and is pasted to my bathroom mirror, positioned in places where I am sure to read it. Oliver's words weave together in a lyrical framework a message essential to our existence as spiritual beings, namely that perfection is not necessary, nor is it in any way a possible component of humanity.
Attempts at perfection dominate our lives, setting up environments of strict expectations and affecting the inevitable disappointment and discomfort that automatically accompanies them. It is difficult, within such a mindset, to surrender our individual wills and to allow whatever is meant to happen, to happen. Everything easily becomes dualistic, strictly right or wrong with little room in between to experience the myriad of emotions that life has to offer. This is a shame, as it is those emotions that are the most essential components of our humanity and our spiritual identities. In essence, the more we push for perfection the further we get from the relationship with self that comprises individual conceptions of spirituality.
The more I try to find perfection in myself, the more I expect it from others and therefore, the more I alienate myself from them. Given this point, it is not surprising that the tools we've created in attempts to operate more efficiently, more perfectly, and in greater communicative capacities, are the very things that serve to disconnect us from the humanness that makes us unique. Our individual traits become washed away by AIM, Facebook, Blackberries and ipods. We become carefully crafted semblances of ourselves as portrayed by our screen name or profile. For all our efforts at perfect portrayals, I find that it is always the person behind the profile, the imperfect and inconsistent individual who offers the most. The people who are our best friends are those we love for their quirky and imperfect sensibilities, for their individual tastes and talents, not for their precise adherence to ideals of friendship.
Given all this, it seems that surrender of our persistent pursuance of perfection would be a no-brainer. And yet, it is simultaneously enforced, in society and otherwise. Many popular interpretations of age-old spiritual traditions are rooted in ideals of perfection - ideals that are arguably impossible. The same kind of dualism that proves a hindrance to surrender of our individual ideas of what life should be is what fuels notions of right and wrong, sinful and virtuous, within religious traditions.
The question then becomes, how do we bridge the gap between fundamental spiritual traditions, the likes of which are often essential to our individual histories, and the imperfect individual identities that make us interesting? Can we be everything all at once?
I certainly think so and wonder if perhaps the aforementioned balancing act is more effortless than we make it out to be. After spending years vying for perfection only to find the definition of it changed each time I thought I'd achieved it, I find I am the perfect me because of, not despite, my flaws. Simultaneously, I can continually turn to spiritual customs to interpret my experiences, finding that my individuality lends itself to overarching ideas of spirituality when released from the limitations of perfectionism. In my life, I make choices that set into motion a series of events that inevitably affect everything I will do henceforth. Such is neither good nor bad, but always somewhere in between. As radical as it may sound, it seems that our choices are neither right nor wrong, but rather they are exactly what they should be.
