The paradox of perfection
In geometric drawing, you tesselate ideally identical shapes using a ruler and a compass, a sharp pencil, and your focus. A couple of years ago I attended a course, titled Geometry of Nature and the Cosmos, learning about different patterns and sitting in peaceful communal creation of these. The finished products look a bit like those colouring books you can buy – repeating patterns of shapes that can be perceived in different ways. They relate to forms in nature and the wider universe, and are used across the world in architecture, tiling, and design. Much sacred and religious architecture is created as a mini version of the wider cosmos; built as a way of bringing heavenly influence down to earth.
As an activity, geometric drawing combines meditative focus with the development of awareness of recurring numbers and shapes, and systems of shapes, in the world around us. It can generate a sense that something bigger – and maybe intentional – is at play, or act as a reminder that the natural world is cohesive and linked. The hexagons of honeycomb, the Fibonacci spirals of shells, the petals of a daffodil, the swirls of a spiral aloe: all of these have a visible pattern and dimensions which feel balanced and somehow innately right, or perfect.
As humans, we are often pulled towards these examples of perfection, perhaps some of us more than others. I don’t know the details of the psychology (although I’d obviously love to dive into it), but I imagine it is something to do with the reassuring nature of regularity. The feeling of balance and predictability, of things being uniform and aesthetically pleasing. Some people (hi) care more about perfection than others, but it’s often seen as a marker of high standards and achievement, and embedded across Western society in the way we value and measure things.
We’re culturally having a bit of a moment of dismissing perfection as a goal. Instead it’s portrayed as a hindrance, something that stops us taking action and prevents us from savouring the journey of something, with all its inevitable twists and turns. Although there is much in the way of truth in such thinking, the pursuit of perfection remains a pervasive idea, and is still often covertly or overtly considered as a desirable quality. It’s also, in my personal experience, something that can be relentless, tiring, and often debilitating. There’s been lots written about perfectionist tendencies and their emotional effect. But I’ve recently become viscerally aware of how my particular inclinations in this area influence my life, and where they tip into being more unhelpful than useful.
It’s a well-worn, clichéd answer to the interview question about your biggest weakness: “Oh, I’m a perfectionist”, followed by a framing of this so-called weakness as a strength. The subtext being that yes, you might take a bit too long to refine things, but why wouldn’t your interviewers want an employee who seeks to make things to be the best they can be? But what if saying that your biggest weakness is perfectionism is really true? And what if – perversely – this weakness is actually the basis on which you’ve built most of your career to date? I’m not blind to the fact that my eye for detail, and need to get things right, is the reason I’ve spent a large part of my working life in jobs that centre around identifying imperfections and rectifying them. I’ve pursued – and had some success in – roles which involve a large amount of checking, editing, and proofreading. I have an aptitude for and enjoy these kind of activities: correcting spelling and grammar, ensuring the consistency of terms used in a piece of writing, fixing alignment of chunks of text, balancing spacing.
Yet sometimes it simultaneously feels like my pull towards this sort of work is also my greatest undoing. It’s not exactly expressive, or free, in its nature. For someone on the more introspective side, this can feel comfortable, but it can also mean you sort of end up stifling the more experimental and creative side of your brain. There’s not much room for trying things out, or (gasp) possibly getting them wrong. The fear of making an error or missing something can become hugely anxiety-inducing. It means my sense of accomplishment, and even my sense of self, becomes largely predicated on something which takes a high level of concentration and incredibly high standards to achieve. And frankly, it’s something which is not always even possible – there’s a reason the adage about us being humans, not machines, persists.
So what does this do to someone like me, who continues to hold up fairly unobtainable standards for myself? Because of course, my perfectionism spills out into other areas of my life. I continue to grapple with the best way of taming it, to stop giving myself a hard time when I can’t quite meet the lofty, unrealistic and intangible standards by which I judge my endeavours.
In the classes on the geometric drawing course, I was introduced to a powerful idea that still reverberates around my brain, and it goes something like this: perfection is inherently impossible, and in trying to achieve it (i.e. by making that first line on the paper when starting a geometric design), you have already failed. A perfect line would be invisible to the human eye; anything that is visible means the line is (at a very micro level, of course) skewed to one way or the other. Blows your mind a bit, right? And viewed a certain way, can feel rather defeatist – what’s the point of trying, if you’ll all but immediately fail?
Considered further however, this idea has the potential to be liberating. Working on those drawings was a useful lesson in letting go of perfectionism, because every line and circle I created was measured and drawn with a ruler or a compass, and they still weren’t perfect. There were gaps and the shapes didn’t properly match up and weren’t perfectly symmetrical, because that wasn’t actually possible. Full perfection is not something humans can really attain. It’s a comforting reminder that pretty much whatever we do will always somehow fall short – and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean things can’t be valuable, beautiful even. The drawings I made on the course still appear satisfying and symmetrical in the way that they are intended to.
Illusions of perfection aren’t usually literal perfection, although our brains might understand them as such. The world throws us examples of this all the time. The ranunculus, an incredible flower, feels illustrative here. The tightly packed, circular layers of petals can seem perfectly formed and idealised. But they’re irregular, of course they are. There’s no specific pattern that they follow, and each flower is all the more interesting and transfixing because of this. Nature teems with things that look perfect, but can’t possibly be. There might be perfection in their appearance, yet closer inspection conveys a more complex reality. A poppy seed head, regular and repeating, but in reality variated by tiny incremental differences in colour, texture, and shape, which in fact combine to make it even more beautiful. Perfect imperfection.
The Brene Brown print sits on my wall: “IMPERFECT” the letters spell, the “F” ironically off-centre and falling out of the central rectangular frame of the image. “You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, and you are worthy of love and belonging”, reads the embossed text in the space where the letter should be. I love the wit of this print, but also its embodiment of what it is to be human, to be stuck in a body and mind that are “wired for struggle” and make things more difficult than they need to be. Which in my case, means tending to strive for something – perfection – that is not ever going to be consistently achievable.
Done is better than perfect, I repeat to myself, as I try and get comfortable with this as a maxim, as a way of living. And more than that, as I navigate the waters of being a recovering perfectionist: my worth and my value do not hinge on being perfect. Things are more intriguing and lovely for their inconsistency and unpredictability, their irregularities and uncertainties. The patterns and mathematics of the natural world give some order to what would otherwise be chaos, but ultimately they underpin wildness and variety. And these are what make things interesting.