The Flaw in Perfection

Being happy doesn’t mean being perfect.

It’s a new year and I’m going to guess most of you are still focused on resolution and goals for 2019. On some level we are all on a mission to be the best we can be, to be happy, to have the perfect house, family, partner, and job. To complete our to-do list, to complete out bucket list, to make our parents proud, to get promoted, earn more money, be successful, and retire early.

Life can often feel like we are on a hamster wheel, going quickly around and around. As we run faster to try to progress down this path, the goal remains out of reach.

Are we setting ourselves up to fail in this quest for the perfect life? Will it even result in happiness?

I believe our quest for success, happiness, even perfection, is the main reason we are not happy. Are we setting realistic goals and expectations for ourselves? Are we merely trying to conform to media ideals, much like Barbie syndrome?

Then to make things even more difficult, we try to compare ourselves to everyone around us feeling like they’ve got it mastered and we’re falling short. Perhaps it’s the unrealistic views we get from the media, perfect job, perfect wedding, perfect life. For the most part it’s all fake, yet we still try to hold ourselves to this unobtainable standard, which is ourselves up to fail.

I spent years trying to have the perfect life, working hard to get ahead in my career, trying to conform to what I thought would make everyone happy, and guess what, it made me unhappy and unfulfilled. The perfect life always seemed just out of reach, and yet my life on the outside probably looked pretty good to everyone else.

Then my husband got sick, not sick like a cold, but really sick, we weren’t sure if he’d recover. Blessedly he is alive and well. During this difficult time all the things I had been reaching for lost their importance. It was freeing to give it all up and it allowed me to set out to rebuild my life around my passions and restore my happiness.

I took time to think, to be still, and I learned from some amazing people about how they became happy and how to live an authentic, perfectly imperfect life. I’ve learned that:

• Things rarely go as planned
• The to-do list may never be complete
• Do the best you can with what you’ve got, and don’t fixate on trying to be perfect
• No one has a perfect life (despite what it may look like on Facebook or Instagram)
• Happiness is not a point you arrive at in the distant future when you resolve all your problems and achieve perfection

Ironically, once I stopped the quest for perfection, allowed myself to be happy and truly grateful for what I did have, many good things happen.

Happiness is about loving what we have rather than chasing down the things we think we want. If we can focus on what’s good in every imperfect moment, we’ll all feel a lot more fulfilled and that’s when the magic happens.