On Perfection

My husband has more trouble than I do dealing with the notion that perfection is difficult or impossible to achieve in this fallen world.

We just spent two days at our cottage working on the exterior. The wood on the addition was still bare and needed priming. The rest of the cottage is in bad need of exterior paint, which, of course, necessitates removing all the chipped and loose stuff. The weather didn't cooperate totally on the first day, but one can scrape and wire brush in the rain, so we got started. The second day we finished the scraping and started priming. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that I did the sides and back of the cottage while my husband did a portion of the front.

My husband is stronger than I am and no less ambitious. He is a hard worker, but he is also a perfectionist. I can accept the fact that no matter how much scraping I do, somewhere there will still be a fragment that is loose. At some point added effort does not yield sufficient improvement to warrant expending that effort. My dear husband does not or cannot and, I think, will not ever grasp this concept.

As a child I sometimes drove myself to perfection. When I first started taking piano lessons, I remember forcing myself to go back to the beginning and start over if I made even one tiny little mistake. At some point I decided that I was never going to be a concert pianist...that I was much more interested in being a vocalist...and that I wanted to be able to play adequately to accompany myself to practice singing. I really didn't care if I was a good enough pianist to play publicly.

I also realized that minor mistakes or flaws are never noticed by most people. As a child, I made a beaded belt on a loom following a pattern to create an Americana motif of flags and eagles. I remember purposely putting one black bead where there should have been a dark blue one. I did this by conscious choice to defy my own perfectionistic nature, as though to prove to myself that sometimes a good job wasn't much different that a perfect one.

Now, I must add that as a nurse, there are excellent reasons to be perfectionistic. When I worked in the clinical area, I was totally rigid about administering medications. Having a son with life threatening food allergies, raised my ability to be perfectionistic to an art form...or maybe, to total neurosis.

I guess each of us must decide for ourselves what level of performance we are comfortable with. The world we live in is far from perfect. When God created it, He declared that it was good, but sin and death entered his extraordinary world, and we deal with the results every day. I think it is mentally healthier, and more productive in the long run, to accept that.

When we have a piece of furniture that needs to be assembled, my perfectionistic husband bogs down if everything doesn't line up right. I assume going into the project that either things won't line up right, or some screw or nut will be missing from the packet, or a step will be missing from the instructions, or something else will go wrong. It's just not as upsetting that way, and I have a more realistic estimate of how long the project will take.

So, I didn't try to work on the same side of the cottage as my husband. It was easier on my nerves and better for our relationship, if I didn't have to watch him expending mega-effort to achieve a tiny increment of improvement. That is his choice, not mine.