I used to be a perfectionist. I gave it up — not because I stopped caring about perfection, but because I realized it doesn’t exist in this world. Perfection lives only in our minds, an idea we can neither see nor touch. A true circle exists only as a concept; no one can actually draw one. But that doesn’t mean the perfect circle isn’t real.
Maybe we shouldn’t abandon the pursuit of perfection altogether. Yet chasing perfection is itself an extreme, and extremes always end in ruin. Demanding perfection of yourself is a weight that keeps dragging your progress down. The world is imperfect by nature, so pursuing perfection was never possible in the first place.
Rather than a perfectionist, I’d sooner be a great idealist. Idealism holds that a perfect state exists, without demanding that it ever be realized. The more unlikely something is, the more an idealist is willing to believe it will happen. After all, if an ideal could be reached easily, it wouldn’t be called an ideal.
The darker the world grows, the more I long for light — because darkness is nothing but the absence of light. I don’t insist that the world become what I dream of before I leave it. Still less do I insist that my ordinary abilities produce some immediate, visible change toward that better world. But I will know that I carried this ideal with me through my life. And I will know something more: the more life falls short, the more the ideal proves its worth. How cool is that.
These days I have no wish for a perfect life. I want a life full of twists and hardship, because it’s precisely the setbacks that teach me to treasure the good moments while I’m living them.
I choose to keep my ideals. Realizing them may take a stroke of luck, and I understand well enough that the odds of that luck arriving aren’t worth counting on. But so what? At least I will have carried my ideals through this life.
The more life disappoints us, the more carefully we should tend the garden of idealism in our hearts.
May idealism bloom in every one of our hearts. May we each be a great idealist — ordinary, but never mediocre.
