I used to be a perfectionist, but I gave it up. Not because I lost my desire for perfection — but because I realized perfection doesn’t exist. It lives only in our minds, an invisible, untouchable concept. A perfect circle exists purely as an idea. No one can draw a flawless circle in the real world — yet that doesn’t mean the perfect circle itself isn’t real.
Perhaps we shouldn’t abandon the pursuit of perfection entirely. But the pursuit itself is an act of extremism, and extremes always lead to ruin. The pressure of having to be perfect slows us down, grinding our progress to a halt. The world itself is riddled with imperfections — so chasing perfection was never possible to begin with.
Rather than perfectionism, I’d rather become a great idealist. Idealism acknowledges that a perfect state exists — but doesn’t demand that it be realized. The more impossible something seems, the more an idealist is willing to believe it will happen. After all, if an ideal could be easily achieved, it wouldn’t be called an ideal.
The darker the world becomes, the more I yearn for light — because darkness is simply the absence of it. I don’t insist that the world transform into my ideal before I leave it. Nor do I insist that my ordinary abilities can make any immediate difference. But I know this: I carried this ideal with me through my entire life. And I know that the harder life gets, the more it reveals the value of holding on to ideals in the first place. How extraordinary is that?
These days, I don’t wish for a perfect life. I hope mine is full of twists and hardships — because it’s precisely those struggles that make me cherish the good times when they arrive.
I’ll keep holding on to my ideals. Perhaps bringing them to life requires a stroke of luck, and I understand that the odds of that luck arriving aren’t worth pinning all my hopes on. But so what? At the very least, I carried my ideals with me through this life.
The harder life gets, the more we should tend the garden of idealism in our hearts.
May idealism bloom within all of us. May we be ordinary, but never mediocre — may we be great idealists.
