Part 1
Perfection’s Folly
As you may remember from a previous column,
there are some potentially harmful phrases in
our language that tend to irritate me. There
Larry Wonderling
are also a few words that unintentionally may
create distorted expectations about the common sense realities
of human limitations. Perhaps the most perfect example is the
noun Perfection or its adjective perfect.
Everybody flops once in a while, sometime, or frequently.
After all, we’re only human; which amounts to a perpetual
treadmill of occasional failures and self-doubts. And you may
have guessed that’s one of the many reasons I can’t believe
perfection really exists. I do feel, however that, like sainthood,
it can serve as a motivational “brass ring” for some who may
be persuaded to keep advancing to the very upper limits of
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Then there may even be that rare one-in-a-trillion with uncanny
perseverance, genes, stamina, brilliance, etc, that defies
probability theory with a genuine demonstration of perfection.
I guess I’m just admitting that I haven’t known everyone who
ever existed that might have harnessed perfection, and besides,
research also acknowledges that most anything might occur by
chance. Even perfection? I doubt it, but I certainly can’t disprove
it. More pragmatically, the illusive term “perfection” actually
comes in a wide variety of sizes and shapes that certainly aren’t
exclusively human qualities. That ubiquitous term “game” is
one of them. You can’t win if you don’t play—the game. And
as a wise philosophy professor once told me when I complained
about life’s unfairness, “It’s all just a game.”
That’s when I concluded, since these games are typically
created by humans who haven’t impressed me as perfection,
each one of us may have our own personalized definition of
perfection. A teacher, for example, creates a one hundred item
test and any student with a raw score of 100 or hundred percent
correct has a perfect score. You may be an “also ran” in most of
life’s interactions but your test score represents perfection—at
least in that particular game.
Although I agree the word perfection is a “so what