a love-hate relationship with a love-hate relationship, oh and perfection.
I contradict myself all the time - but my therapist said it's okay to live in the 'both-and'
A phrase that is often used to express the complexity of loving and hating something, is “a love-hate relationship”. That tugging between loving and hating, the constant merry-go-round of those two feelings.
I both hate and love that phrase – a love-hate relationship with a love-hate relationship.
I dislike it for the mere reason that I do not like being uncertain, because being uncertain means I am not perfect, that I am leaving questions or sometimes answers, open-ended. And here, we bleed into the next thing I loath, perfection, and the word ‘perfect’.
By definition, the word perfect refers to something or someone without flaws or fault. Naturally, such a person or thing does not exist. We have been taught to attempt to emulate this word, the very definition of it. To live it, to breathe it, to become it in body, mind, and soul. And it this definition that I hate, this I should have expressed before.
I prefer the other aspect of it, the only aspect I wish I could see always. And that is that perfection is imperfection. That in something not being perfect, it is. In something being open-ended, in something sitting unfinished, shattered, broken, abandoned, it is perfect. Not without flaw or fault, one might ask, how is that perfect? When it betrays the very definition of it?
In some ways it fulfills the definition because when we say that something with fault is perfect, we say fault is preferable, flaw is admired, and perfection is preferable, perfection is admired. Perfection is an ever-fluctuating concept, that ebbs and flows with the change of the tides and winds and moon. It is not a stagnant thing, a ‘set-in-stone’ thing. The word itself was made by man, thus it is defined by man, it is changed by man, it is susceptible to the whims of man, the character of man, the nature of man.
We created it and so we recreate it, we perpetually keep it in a state of fluctuation and violent growth and death. We allow it to be open-ended and vulnerable to the forces of desire and human…human…ness. Vulnerable to the force, the human force. Which is a force both capable of storing love and hatred in the same vessel. Together.
Capable of sustaining both perfection and flaw, an ever-contradicting force. How can something that is continuously contradicting every fraction of its being, be with flaw and fault, yet still be called by others and titled as ‘perfect’? I think that’s just it, isn’t it? it is.
Yes.
That is the very definition of perfect.