The Beauty of Imperfection

While I was studying at the University of Toronto in the late 1980’s there was a Professor of Philosophy who was fond of saying, “If something is worth doing, than it is worth doing poorly.”  He wanted to unshackle his students from the tyranny of perfection.  In his view the aphorism, “If some is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” meant that many never tried to do it at all; they were oppressed by either the fear of failure or the burden of the task.  The quest for perfection can mutate into perfectionism which robs a person not only of the joy and pleasure in what they do but can even stop them from making an attempt at it.

Instead it is often better if the quest is to discover the beauty in imperfection. The commentator Linda Johnson said:

We are bombarded daily with images of 'perfection' - the perfect body, the perfect relationship, the perfect car, house, job, health, bank balance, family and so on. We are led to believe that once we reach these ideals we will be fulfilled, so we aspire to things outside of ourselves to make us happy.

And yet when we look inside ourselves we are often confronted and taunted by our imperfections.  Our failure to rise to even our own best intentions can cause us to lose hope and stop trying.  Beauty is a very difficult concept to define.  In the same sentence I can say that my grand-daughter, my daughter and my wife are beautiful and yet I know that the beauty I find in each of them is experienced differently.

I mentioned recently that some years ago I was on a five day retreat at the Anglican retreat house in Cheltenham (which no longer exists).  Through the window of the dining room I could see an enormous oak tree in the courtyard.  The tree was gnarled and scared from a hundred years of pruning.  I remarked to one of the other people on retreat what a beautiful tree it was; that the scars seemed to be a thing of beauty showing the long and fruitful life this tree had lived.  The other retreatant looked at the tree and said, “Um, pretty old thing, maybe they should cut it down.”  The response surprised me but it reinforced in me the notion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The Song of Songs is a book that introduces the reader to an intimate relationship between two people.  It speaks of the physical beauty of both the Bride and the Bridegroom.  Chapter 4:1 states:

How beautiful you are, my dearest, how beautiful!

Your eyes are like doves behind your veil,

your hair like  a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead.

Your teeth like a flock of ewes newly shorn,

freshly come up from dipping; all of them have twins and

none has lost a lamb.

Now these are not the images that we might choose to speak of a woman’s beauty, but in the nomadic culture of ancient Israel, doves, flocks of goats, ewes and lambs were the most valuable things they had and so they are pressed into service to describe this woman’s beauty. For all we know she may have been a very average person, but through the eyes of her beloved she is transformed into the essence of beauty.

Beauty is not an absolute, nor is there such a thing as perfection.  The love of beauty teaches us that beauty is something we appreciate with the heart, rather than the eye and the heart is always accepting of life’s imperfections.

Christopher