My father used to sing the old song “Look for the silver lining whenever clouds appear in the blue.” This always confused me as a child, since clouds very often do have silver-grey edges. But perhaps my childish failure to understand “silver lining” wasn’t so far off. Maybe, rather than trying to remember that “somewhere the sun is shining” we’re better off seeing the beauty in the clouds themselves.
Where have you found unexpected beauty?
When I was in college I had an experience that I originally perceived as being totally negative, but eventually it helped shape my life in a positive way. It’s my nature to be a Type-A personality, a perfectionist and an overachiever. I understand this about myself. It’s partially genetic (it runs in the family) and partially a learned behavior (still subconsciously seeking the approval of my indifferent parents). My natural drive toward perfection has lead me to achieve things that might otherwise have been beyond my reach, but the end result often wasn’t the happiness that I had hoped for. Here’s where it began to turn around for me.
By my third year of college, I was maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA, I had been inducted into an honor fraternity and elected Student of the Month. My world revolved around passing the next test with flying colors and maintaining my straight-A record. The pressure I felt was starting to wear on me but I didn’t see any alternative but to press onward. In my mind, anything less than a perfect score was a failure.
I took a class in Mechanical Drawing as part of the engineering degree I was pursuing. I imagined it would be a fairly easy class. This was before computer aided drafting. We used old fashioned pencils, rulers, triangles, velum and a drafting table to create precision drawings for industrial design. These drawings were created from detailed descriptions provided by the instructor. The final product was measured against the instructor’s drawing. In order to be 100% correct your completed drawing had to match his exactly when the two were held up together to the light. The smallest deviation in length or width of any line was counted as a mistake. The weight given to these errors was the up to the instructor. It could be as little as 1/4 of a point off the final grade or as much as 10 points, depending on the severity. It was entirely subjective and up to his final discretion.
You can imagine how seriously I took this challenge. I labored for hours and eventually for days on these drawings as they continued to increase in detail and complexity. I maintained my straight-A’s throughout the entire course, staying just above 90% correct on every assignment. After 16 weeks, the final exam was the most difficult assignment to date, combining all of the skills we had learned and demanding a high level of abstract thinking to visualize the object as described. I clocked 27 hours of drawing time to complete it, striving to be absolutely perfect. I submitted my work and waited for my final grades for that semester.
My final report card had all A’s for every class except for one. The Mechanical Drawing class was a B+. My overall final grade for the class was 89%, with a 90% need for an A. Initially, I felt crushed by this turn of events as I realized that I would never graduate from college with a 4.0 GPA, no matter how hard I tried. It was no longer possible to be perfect. That had been taken away from me by one percentage point.
Eventually, I came to understand what a relief this was. I began to feel like a great weight was being lifted from my shoulders. I NO LONGER HAD TO BE PERFECT! I could just do my best going forward with the knowledge that it was good enough.
A year later, I graduated with honors (3.9 GPA on a 4.0 scale). My education has served my well in chosen field. I owe a great debt to the people who taught me those skills, but one of the most important lessons I learned wasn’t included in the curriculum; the knowledge that always striving to be perfect will ultimately lead to misery. I am thankful that I learned that lesson early in life. It’s certainly one worth remembering.
Yesterday I went through boxes of stuff have been in an attic infested with everything from birds to rodents to spiders for 12 years. Some boxes of family archives were remarkably untouched. But there was one big one that had baskets in it originally that was filled with a rat nest – leaves, fabric, yarn, baskets, lace, tissue papper all in bits – a fluffy mass of color and hard work. I couldn’t tell that it had been used for anything like raisng a family; it seemed like simply a festival of everything the rat could find and drag into the box though a 2 inch opening. It was quite lovely.
I have found beauty in the people around me, the smiles, even the sadness means they care, and that is beauty
This recalls something I read in the book “Against Happiness” by Eric G. Wilson.
“The greatest tragedy is to live withoug tragedy. To hug happiness is to hate life. To love peace is to loathe the self. The blues are clues to the sublime. The embrace of gloom stokes the heart.”
While I don’t agree with everything he says, the book itself is worth a read.
Will we know who the perfectionist is?
Sorry, I see it’s Al.