On Being Perfectly Imperfect

The appointment you missed.
The important call you forgot to return.
The email you wish you hadn’t sent.

Your favorite sweater, washed by accident in hot water.

Shrunk beyond saving.

Ugh.

We’ve all thrashed around a little in the messy, imperfect wreckage we helped make. The one where it’s all over and too late, and there’s nothing left to do but live with what we did.

And notice what the body does when it happens.

Everything tightens.
The walls move in.
Suddenly there’s no air, no give, nowhere to stand that isn’t the mistake itself.

I once had a neighbor named Jerry — an emergency room doctor who, in his off-hours, played piano, studied Russian, and directed plays in a tiny theater he’d built in his own basement.

Yup. Stage, lighting, the works.

He wasn’t waiting to be good enough. He simply made room for the life he wanted and stepped into it.

I think of Jerry whenever I catch myself not doing something I ache to do — because I might fail, might get it wrong, might take up too much space or make too much noise.

All that fear.

It’s exhausting!

A little nauseating, even, when I think about it — to see it laid out like that. My whole body contracts just naming it.

What if the mess was never the problem? What if the crack is exactly where the room opens up?

Alan Watts once said that whatever is absolutely perfect is absolutely dead — because there’s no room left in it to change, to breathe, to become.

Maybe imperfection was never the failure.

Maybe it’s the beginning.

So here’s what we’re sitting with this week: what might finally have room to grow, if we stopped sealing off all the places we got wrong?

Ahhh 🌱

Continue the Journey

The reflection above comes from A Year to Clear, the book behind this year-long Journey to a Lighter You.

New here? You haven’t missed a thing — every post stands on its own, and this is a spacious place to begin, right where you are.

There’s a reframe waiting below that changes what a mistake even is. And a practice for meeting the mess without lunging to clean it up.

Just one minute. That’s all it asks.

Join us.