On Eliminating the Word "Perfect"

Do you ever feel like a hypocrite?

Here I am sharing ideas about mindfulness.  And sometimes I have moments, days, or weeks when I feel like I've hardly been mindful about anything.  I'm buzzing about, distractedly thinking about what's coming next.  I experience these times both at school and in other settings.

It's easy for me to blame.  It's the schedule, it's other people, it's my own poor planning.

But I think I feel like a hypocrite at those times of little focus because I'm too busy striving for something that simply does not exist: perfection.  In this case, I'll define perfection as a state in which the outer circumstances and my inner experience matching identically with a mental vision of how I believe things ought to be right now.  Eckhart Tolle reminds us that such clinging to how we want things to be leads to unhappiness.  Accepting and experiencing what actually is right now - living in the present moment - leads to fulfillment.

So this is my case for eliminating the word "perfect" from our usage - or at least changing its meaning to accept whatever is at the moment.  The more I recognize that I'll never be perfect (according to my own conception of what perfect is), and neither will my students or anyone else, the easier it is to accept what is, to respond lovingly to things as they are, and to live more fully.