We’re constantly bombarded with messaging about how we can be better, more efficient humans. Defy aging with this eye cream! Optimize your SEO for maximum views! Use this app to reach maximum productivity!
It’s exhausting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be human. At one time, I thought that there a perfect version of myself that I needed to strive for, someone who had no flaws or feelings or difficulties. I thought that to be human was to reach the most unmarred of myself. If I could just TRY harder, I’d get there. And if I couldn’t bring myself to try hard enough, then there was something inherently wrong with me.
With time, my perspective has shifted. I’ve given myself grace. I am learning to lean into being a messy, inconsistent human who feels things deeply and makes mistakes and changes her mind and has good days and bad days. I’ve remembered that the urgent chant of “more! more! more!” is a toxic characteristic of white supremacy, and I’ve complained about being told to do more in the midst of a pandemic.
Perfectionism is poisonous
There have been two pieces of writing that have deeply influenced me this year. The first is this:
You are not a machine. You are more like a garden. You need different things on different days. A little sun today, a little less water tomorrow. You have fallow and fruitful seasons. It is not a design flaw. It is wiser than perpetual sameness. What does your garden need today?
If you expect a garden to “produce” things with the same regularity and sameness as a machine, you will be disappointed. If you try to maintain a garden the same way you would a machine, you will destroy it. The same is true of your body and emotional life. Give into your garden.
Joy Marie Clarkson
The second is Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
What both have in common is a recognition that striving for perfection — a mastery of everything, all at once, unendingly — is not only completely impossible, but will break us. We cannot achieve everything, and we can achieve no one thing perfectly.
Embrace your humanity
You and I are not machines. We were never machines. We are “child[ren] of the universe, no less than the trees and stars.” At one point, our ancestors spent all of their lives creating, whether it be shaping pottery or cooking or telling stories or making music or sewing. At one point, we remembered who we were.
You and I, we’re human. We are full of contradictions and limitations, and that is what gives us character and substance. That’s what makes us everything we are and, in a paradoxical way, perfect.
Remember to slow down. Embrace your full humanity. Tend your garden.