I found the process of learning to write pretty frustrating. In primary school, my teacher would ink out these incredibly well-shaped letters on the whiteboard and I’d struggle to copy her, my own lettering a squiggly mess. Once I’d started to get the hang of it, I had a dream of myself skimming my fingers over a page and producing typed print. I assumed if something kept getting better, surely the end result must be that it becomes perfect.
Over time, my handwriting became neater and neater, and now it’s a tight cursive – but there’s still crooked lines, skinny loops and sloppy corners. It’s not a flawless print, and it never will be.
Even in popular use, the idea of ‘perfect’ usually ends up just meaning ‘adequate’ or ‘to a high standard’ – for example, the perfect candidate for a job is the one that fits all the criteria. I hardly think an employer, upon finding an employee they deem ‘perfect’, would realistically expect them to turn up to work at 9.00am on the dot every day or never make a mistake.
Likewise, although a great deal of fuss is made over celebrity bodies, if there was one ‘perfect’ quality to determine beauty, how could people differ in their opinion of the most beautiful woman? The perfect body just doesn’t exist.
Nothing in life will ever be perfect, not even in airbrushed magazine covers or movies. When a girl sighs in the 1999 film American Pie that she wants the act of losing her virginity to be perfect, her friend is blunt: “It’s not a rocket launch. It’s sex”. Her point was that it doesn’t have to be meticulously planned out (although even rocket launches have their share of imperfect moments).
I’m never going to have a perfect life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Life is a damn messy business. You try at things and fail, you make mistakes, you waste your time and lose some things forever. That’s what makes all the good times so worthwhile. And I’m not going to spend my life waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect man, the perfect idea or the perfect time.
It’ll never come.
ahhh, but when something is perfect, how wonderful. And to realise it’s perfect at the time, priceless. It may be a sight, like a super moon, or a motion, like a Buddy Franklin goal or, better still, a moment, like silence in a forest. Perfect things do happen, more often than you think.