March 18, 2010

  • Perfect

    Love this new search feature they have on Xanga.

    I miss my voice. I don't know how to get it back. Writer's block for... too long now. Keeping on.

    What is this human obsession with perfection? Or should I say, what is my neurotic tendencies towards it? Perhaps I overblow the "problem." My bedroom floor, my office work area, and other physical aspects of my life are often in complete disarray, which I often deal with pretty sanely.

    These are included in a short list of some things in life that although they are not perfect, they are at the least discountable. Disposable. Set in a corner and ignored. Paint-in-beige-able and allowed to disappear into the background. -able. I need to stop making up words.

    Take Sudokus for example. I'm not one of the masses of people who enjoy doing the number game. The satisfaction that follows is not enough to offset the fact that I wasted time staving off dementia by wrestling the urge to pull out my hair or throw the puzzle halfway across the room. If I make a mistake, I can throw the stupid thing out and revel in my 'stupid puzzle' soapbox. I much prefer crosswords which I like to think teaches me new things. Like the fact that the Boston Globe often recycles words. ("Hm... maybe 'crosshairs' will be used again...")

    Or maybe I'm just teaching myself to give up easily. Maybe Sudoku is meant to test endurance. Maybe my end-of-days trial will be sitting at a table faced with pages and pages of near-empty boxes with "Chuck Norris" level Sudokus to complete or die or face giving up my religion. And they have to be perfect.

    Speaking of religion. (Awesome transition, I know.) It's tough trying be perfect. Even for the non chapel-inclined, perfection is still difficult. Perfection, really, is an anomaly. In Christianity, perfection is a journey, a promise, a person even. Wouldn't it be easier if it were just a list of rules and checklists?

    I take that back.

    This is what makes all this that much more frustrating. Life by itself, even without the compounding, confounding nature of religion, is confusing. And what's more, life is not a giant puzzle that you can just chuck in the trash and start new. Likewise, the spiritual life requires more than just stamina. It's quite the paradigm shift. It's not about perfection or attainments or medals or trophies or feelings of accomplishment...

    You can't trash it and start all over. You can't print out a fresh new eraser-less mark-free pristine page and move on as though nothing happened. Our wounds heal but scars remain. We can hide the defects but not all the time. We can't choose another option, another route, another body, another past.

    This is why I believe Christianity to be a thing of the future. The wave of 'now's that are ever-passing, ever giving fresh new opportunities for forward movement, time never ceasing its march even at those times when we want it to freeze for even a few more minutes.

    We are resting in the penumbra of earth's future. The darkness is ever passing and the light ever increasing.

    Don't give up.

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