Living Happiness

When  I woke up this morning, I had this post all planned out in my head: peppy little title, aptly chosen opening quote, hand-picked personal anecdotes, and all my key points lined up in a little row.  Ta-Da!  This was going to be simple.

But, as I sat down and put fingers to keyboard, I realized that what I was going to write about was both of these things:

A.  a load of hooey

B.  already beaten to death by all of the other blogs out there

For you see, I was going to write about failure.  Success and failure, actually, and all of the great and marvelous things that can be said about it (and have been … to the death), which is Reason Number One why this post is not going to take that tack after all.

Reason Number Two: As I started writing my list of “failures” to share with you, I couldn’t believe the kind of silliness I was writing down.  “Seriously?” my Inner Voice piped up, “You’re putting down your chipped toenail polish as a failure?  God, if that’s all it takes then everybody in the world might as well curl up and die.  Why don’t you put ‘gray roots, need dye job’ on the list, too, just for posterity,” as she contemptuously snorted.

I looked at my list and she was right: it was utterly ridiculous the kinds of things I was setting down there as failures.  Imperfections, maybe, but failures?  Not a chance.

And that’s when my Inner Voice, having sufficiently calmed herself into some modicum of decorum (she had been laughing loud enough to beat the band), chimed in again: “You’re confusing imperfection with failure.  But if imperfection and failure were the same, we would have all had to hang it up a long time ago.  Lighten up already!”

Damn it.  She was right again.  But I was glad she was, because it was no fun sitting and feeling like the world’s biggest loser … and all because I was 1) trying to take myself too seriously and 2) trying to be perfect instead of just being me.

How many of us do this, though?  And often?

We read our feel-good magazines, we devour the articles in wellness and personal-development blogs, and then we measure our successes against the standard set before us only to come up short.

We don’t have time to meditate every day, we can’t afford to eat all organic all the time, we fight with our spouse or children or boss or best friend, we carry on the business of living all day long and hope that there’s time for us at the end … only to find, all too often, that there’s not.

We know what we “should” do.  We know what the happy perfect life looks like.  Why can’t we attain it?

Because we’re not perfect, and we’re not asked to be.  We’re simply asked to show up today and be.  Really.

Be.

There’s only one us, and we’re not perfect but we’re here.  And there’s a reason for it.  And we’re going to mess up and make mistakes and have unpainted toenails and dust bunnies in our houses and piles of dishes in our sink and all kinds of things still hanging out on our To-Do list that we never seem to get to, but that doesn’t make us failures.

Today, I would like to ask you give you permission to take yourself off the hook.  Nobody thinks you need to be perfect but you.

And I would like to leave you with these two reflections:

Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. ~Ieyasu Tokugawa

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell. ~Ben Okri

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

How do you welcome your imperfections?

How do you deal with perceived failures?

Namaste,

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