Yesterday I was struggling to keep my inner perfectionist contained, rather than letting her take over myself. You see I don't really want to be the person she wants me to be anymore. She doesn't take time to look at the sky. She doesn't interrupt her work to cuddle a cat or a dog, or just to stare off into space and listen to the birds sing. She worries more about preparing the perfect gourmet meal rather than just throwing something together and enjoying the coming together and the sharing of time and conversation and food. She worries about not only being "good enough" but also about being "better than", because of course, the whole idea of being good enough implies that some people and some things are good enough and some aren't, and therefore some are better than others.
I'm done with all that. Increasingly I reject the idea of better than. I want to be a person who sees beauty and finds peace in the ordinary passage of each day. Well except for these rare moments when I allow my inner perfectionist to have her way. And they are mostly mere moments. Yes I wish to do and be the best I can, but I also want to enjoy all that this life has to offer. Increasingly I succeed.
It surprised me therefore when my mind wandered off into the land of stress and striving on Monday. Out of which corner of my mind had these thoughts taken hold? It had been such a good weekend: I hosted a casual dinner party, the second in as many months, sharing a pot of chili with good friends. I went out to dinner and a play and a lovely evening of conversation with another friend. I went to a party where I chatted and circulated and enjoyed wonderful conversations with many people, all echoes of that once-upon-a-time 20-year wallflower no where in evidence. There were more meetings and conversations and no sense of stress. What happened?
I wish I could banish her forever, this demon of never enough. But of course I can't; she is a part of who I am. We all have our inner voices, and although we can learn to tame them, we cannot completely expunge them from our innermost thoughts. Mostly, not-good-enough remains a small voice in my head, one of many voices, one of the myriad complex interactions and ghosts of relationships, conversations, and experiences that make me who I am,. We all have such voices, demons and angels, snippets of life that are welded inextricably to us, the little bits that make us into the multifaceted creatures that we are.
Last evening I was sorting through the photos I had taken through the day; nothing special, no sunrise or sunset, just ordinary cloudy skies. But I saw something in this photo that reminded me that yes, sometimes life is full of joyous sunshine, sometimes it is dark with rain, and more often it is a flow of clouds and sun affording us only glimpses of clarity. Sometimes we yearn for an endless stream of sunny days, but it is the clouds that allow us to really shine, for our subtle colors to come out. Sometimes, with luck, we experience a momentary flash of brilliance, but more often it is subtle flow of life and light that reveals our best selves. Our own subtle colors are allowed to shine in the shifting clouds of our own thoughts and emotions.
