You cannot escape your perfection

In every moment you make a decision that is the best one you can come up with, given all of the information you have, all of your wisdom, all of your love and joy, and all of your pain. It may not work out the way you intended, or expected, or hoped for, and you may wish you had made a “better” decision, or you may think you “should” have made a different choice. When you do that, you diminish yourself for your decision. In looking back in time, you see yourself as less than perfect. And you may think “I could have made a better choice”. Leaving aside the question of “better” or worse choices, let us say what you meant was “I could have made a different choice that would have gotten me the result I wanted”. What I want to tell you is that you couldn’t have, or else you would have. Yes, the possibility of other choices existed, and you were either unaware of them, or chose alternates. Yet in the moment of your making that choice, it seemed like a good idea. Even if you had uncertainty about the outcome, it was still your best shot: you evaluated the limited information in front of you, mixed in your fear, added a dash of your passion, and chose. You are a scale that weighs all that is in you and in front of you, and you cannot be other than you are in that moment. In that is your perfection, and the perfection of your decisions.

Many people reading this will protest, “But it was a terrible decision. People died.” It is essential to separate how you feel about yourself from the results of your actions. You are no more or less lovable when something doesn’t work out than at the moment you made the decision. Your actions may have dire consequences. You may need to be accountable for the results, meaning you take action to repair the damage. Yet you are no less perfect. You do not deserve to be punished. You still deserve to be loved just as much. And that starts with you not punishing yourself, and loving yourself. You can still hold yourself in love and take care of the mess you may have made. It is still possible to love someone and see them in their perfection while you demand they clean up the mess they may have made.

Everyone’s intention in making a decision is to make a good one. Try to make a bad decision right now. A bad decision might be to pull my hair until it hurts. So here I go, pulling my hair as I write, and it hurts. That was a bad idea! But there is a part of me that went on the scale of my decision that thought this is a good idea. Or I wouldn’t have done it. And that is the trap of my perfection. I cannot make a bad decision without thinking it’s a good idea to make that bad decision. I am stuck always making decisions, that on balance, I believe are good decisions. I cannot escape making what I believe are good decisions. I cannot escape my perfection.

By perfection, I do not mean that I am evaluating the merit of your decisions. Our generally accepted meaning of perfection is that ones actions lead to results we want. That is, I set a goal, I make decisions and take actions to reach that goal, and if I reach that goal, then I am (closer to) perfect. The judgment of my perfection is not handed down until the results of everything I have done are in. This leaves me at best in limbo, at worst believing that I am not perfect, that I am undeserving and unworthy, that I am not good enough.

The confusion arises from associating myself with the evaluation of my skill. Skill is the ability to reach a goal. A skilled carpenter can build a house exactly as planned. If the house falls down, then they are not a good carpenter, and would be well-advised to do something else other than build houses. The carpenter stands a good chance of feeling badly⎯not just about how the house didn’t work out and its consequences, but about themselves. It may be hard at the end of the day to accept and receive love. Yet they may have felt great while they were building the house, and been able to receive love. Then this shifts when the house comes down. We may not want to love them either. Thus, our love is conditional.

Yet if we recognize that each person is making the only decision possible for them in that moment, that they are truly trapped in making good decisions, then we can let go of deciding whether or not to love them based on the outcome, and room for unconditional love grows. We cannot escape always being worthy and deserving of unconditional love.

If we truly understand how all the people around us, especially our parents, are trying to love us while managing not loving themselves, and we can see the perfection in their decisions, not judging them based on how poorly things worked out for us, then our compassion can flow, and then our acceptance, and then our forgiveness. And then we can know and feel that we are loved, that we are loveable, and that simply, we are love.