Brian Hite Ph.D.
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Embracing Acceptance: Focusing on the Present to Navigate
In our Western society and culture, we strive daily to minimize mistakes, eliminate errors, and avoid or cover up flaws of any kind. Students pursue the vaunted “100” on tests. Athletes attempt to achieve their sport’s version of the “Perfect 10”, an error and mistake-free performance. Cooks of all stripes in kitchens around the globe work hard to ensure that their creations don’t deviate even a little bit from the idyllic pictures accompanying the recipes of the dishes they’re trying to make.
This obsession with perfect, this notion that “perfect” is the ideal state of things and the standard we should always pursue, dates back over 2000 years…at least to the writings of Plato.
Plato believed that everything we see in this universe is a shadowy, imperfect version of a perfect prototype he called a form. Forms, by definition, are perfect versions of any concept we know of. They might be shapes (circles, triangles), animals (dog, giraffe), or more abstract concepts such as beauty. According to Plato, we experience all of these things here on Earth, but we only experience imperfect versions of the perfect forms.
Plato illustrated this idea in a well-known allegory written in The Republic about a cave in which a group of people are chained in a way that prevents them from seeing anything but shadows projected onto a wall directly in front of them. For these people, the shadows are the only reality they know.
Then, one of the people is unchained and turned around to see the actual beings and objects making the shadows. At first, this seems incredibly confusing and unreal; however, then his eyes adjust and he realizes that he is, for the first time, seeing actual reality and that the shadows he’s known his whole life were just shadows. Then, the person is taken outside and shown all that exists outside the cave.
In this allegory, we are the people chained and forced to view only shadows on a wall. The shadows represent our daily perceptions, while the unseen, unknown figures and objects making the shadows are the perfect forms. The implication is that perfection exists and is what we should wish to see, but that our human limitations prevent us from perceiving reality as it truly is.
However, this Platonic, Western notion of perfection being the ideal is not shared by all cultures.
In Japanese culture, for example, there is a concept known as wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi exists when beauty is perceived not in spite of imperfections and flaws, but because of them. Wabi-Sabi is an aesthetic perspective that values and highlights imperfections, that views flaws as things that enhance, rather than diminish, overall beauty.
An example of how wabi-sabi is applied is through the art of kintsugi. Kintsugi is the mending of broken things (dishes, bowls) with a lacquer resin dusted with gold, silver, or platinum. Instead of trying to fix something in a way that exactly restores it to its previous condition, the art of kintsugi embraces wabi-sabi in a way that elevates the beauty, value, and importance of the object specifically because it is NOT exactly the way it was originally designed. It is now better than it originally was precisely because of its flaws.
Imagine if we adopted a perspective that was more akin to wabi-sabi than Plato’s Forms? What if we celebrated the nicks, bumps, scrapes, and scars (physical, mental, and emotional) that come with time spent living on this Earth? What if we all recognized and appreciated that evidence of experience? What if we strove not to avoid the experiences that might lead to the mistakes that result in those nicks and scars, but to seek that experience out intentionally, frequently, and energetically?
Today, take a look around your house and notice all of the things that are no longer perfect. Notice the dent in a shelf that you know was made by your daughter’s head when she fell backward. Notice the scratches on the wall from when the cat knocked over the Christmas tree. Notice the scrapes in the driveway from the pedals that slid across it when your son wrecked his bike while trying to learn to ride a wheelie. Notice the marks on the doorframe documenting the continued growth of your kids from year to year.
Notice, too, the scar on your chin from the amazing tackle you made in a backyard football game. Notice your trepidation when developing relationships that seemed to begin after being cheated on by a spouse or significant other. Notice your hesitation to suggest or try a new approach at work for fear of getting “That’s not how we do things around here” told to you again.
Notice all of these imperfections and the cornucopia of others that define who we are. Then, appreciate the unique beauty that forms when the quilt of these “defects” is viewed as a whole.
None of this is to say that if there are aspects of your life, wounds and scars you carry from the past, that cause you significant discomfort and hinder your daily life and overall well-being you shouldn’t acknowledge and work through those things.
However, even if that’s the case, you’re uniquely you and, therefore, bring unique beauty into the world, not in spite of your imperfections…but because of those imperfections.