Perfect

From “Being Perfect”, a book by Anna Quindlen. 

 “Most of the time when we’re giving people advice, we suggest that they take up something or other: the challenge of the future, the work of the new century… I am more comfortable advising people to give up. Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great heroic leaps into the unknown.

“Much of what we are at five or six is what we wind up wishing we could be at fifty or sixty. And that’s bad enough. But this is worse. Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A beam overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened. You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don’t want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be a contrarian, to go another way.”