That We Might Age Beyond Perfection & Back To Dreams

When I was a child, I tried my very best to be perfect.

It never worked.

Perfection was too hard . . too flat . . too drab and empty a space for my youthful imagination to fill.

And so, over and over again I told myself I had failed. Over and over again, unsuccessfully striving to fit myself into the space inside the lines where adult thinking ruled, I let myself believe I had failed.

Yet how could that have been so, when I had no idea against what measure I was weighing such a heavy load?

Failure. Perfection. What about everything in between?!

How could “failure” have been the response when my childhood dreams simply over-shot perfection’s narrow purview of all that was right and possible?

Then again, they did overshoot . . time and time again. And each time, perfection reminded me how very wrong I was to imagine I was somehow better than perfection itself.

Perfection, I now have grown to realize, had a serious deficit in the area of self esteem. And being such, it had little need of anything that might threaten its status – particularly children’s dreams . . particularly mine.

Yet I was a child. I was a dreamer. My dreams were the greatest gift I could offer that most demanding god of all things perfect.

So, each time perfection rejected my dreams, I told myself I had failed. I believed perfection was what was expected of me, and I hadn’t delivered. I had been rejected.

Then again, what does a child know of things like perfection? To a youngster, what is most alive is perfect . . perfectly wonderful . . perfectly messy . . perfectly doable . . perfectly dream-able.

There is no “either/or” in a child’s mind. Absolutes such as those just can’t breathe in such places.

Perfection Is A Dream Killer

No. “Either/Or” lives in the world of adults. It thrives among straight lines and clean rooms (brain rooms as well as the boxes we adults construct around ourselves and live in).

Adults even create rules to support perfection.

(I know this to be a fact. I eventually grew up and became one. We all do. But don’t worry. It doesn’t last forever.)

And then these same adults – in their seeming all-knowingness and desire to help everyone else find the structured perfection they themselves found – make everyone else (particularly kids and old people) fit themselves into those rules . . those silly coloring inside the lines rules.

You perform as expected . . or you fail. Things have to be measured, you know.

Black or White.

Good or Bad.

Win 0r Lose

Right or Wrong.

Seems simple enough, right? Leave out all the colorful shades of gray where we can get bogged down in dreaming, and no one will get lost in the spaces between the lines.

Put your dreams and fuzzy thinking away, and perfection can reign supreme.

Then again, some adults get so caught up in striving for perfection that they seem to forget:

* It’s in those spaces between the lines and outside the lines where life happens and our dreams get born and grow; and

* Not even adults can live for long without dreams; and

* Trying to live simply within the lines – perfectly – can be very hard when what you’re actually doing is straddling two extremes, neither one of which was ever particularly simple.

Let’s Ask Perfection To Step Aside

You know, the older I get, the less value I see in striving for perfection. It’s so tiring. It’s so overrated. It’s so inflexible.

And what has the push for perfection ever done but create more problems, when what we need now are more and better answers – more wiggly lines on the uneven pages of life?

Besides, I keep finding myself being drawn ever deeper back into those shades of gray where the messiness that is my dreaming lives (not that I ever really left).

The way I see it: We need shades of gray to keep us from going mad!

That’s why aging is so very important. It gives us permission to go looking for meaning in the margins of life – the gray areas – where absolutes hold no sway.

Aging gives us permission . .

NO! . . . Actually, aging gives us authority to grow old outside the lines – beyond the artificiality of perfection – where life happens.

I can’t help believing that somewhere in each of our midlife lives, we are called to stand up and tell perfection to step aside and take a seat.

Somewhere after the middle, there comes a time in our lives when labels like perfection and failure no longer matter. It is a time when the uncertainties of life, the shades of gray, hold far more significance than the purest of adulthood’s absolutes.

But that’s a lot of gray! If you – like I – are somewhere past life’s halfway point, you may be wondering what’s left for you to do and to be in all that gray (i.e., the new spaces between the lines). What is aging asking of you? What is aging expecting of you!

What Is Your Next Step?

You haven’t forgotten how to dream, have you! (Of course you haven’t! Let go of the absolutes, and breathe some new life into that great dreaming of yours.)

You haven’t forgotten where you put your dreams back those many years ago, have you? (Go find them. See what they have to offer you now that you can look at them the with the more creative, less perfect, eyes of life’s second half.)

You haven’t forgotten HOW to turn your dreams into magic, have you? (It’s okay if you have. A little practice, and you’ll be right back where you were when the child that was you fought off  all your fire-breathing dragons with dreams. Now let the aging adult who is you put the dream to new use in fighting the real battles you see in life.)

Our dreams are patient, and most forgiving. Go ahead. Gather up a few and figure out how to save some small corner of the world – or a big chunk if you’re so inclined.

Back when we were young, we believed it was our time to show the world and make a real difference. But we were too young back then to know what our dreams were asking of us.

We’re older now. In fact, we’re old enough to join forces with our dreams and do something real – something that reflects who we’ve become and how much we have to offer in fixing some of the messes we created during that “Adult Perfection” phase of our lives.

Isn’t it time to stop waiting?

Isn’t it time to dream our legacies alive?

We must strip the labels away, and give our aging selves the freedom to dance with uncertainty . . for uncertainty is our constant companion as we grow ever older.

And once we learn to spin the meaning that defines our lives beyond all we imagine to be perfect, the gray areas of our aging will turn to brilliant color.

Perfection will hide its face.

And our dreams will guide us home.

.   .   .   .   .

Have you spent much of your life battling against the forces of perfection? How did you do with that, by the way?

What dreams have you set aside in the name of striving for perfection? What dreams are you now ready to give new life in the name of aging outside of perfection – aging into the pure messy creativity where real answers to real problems live?

And, how do you imagine your dreams might give your answers new form?

Please, share your stories and your dreams here. After all, we’re all dreamers. And we love to support each others dreams as they you figure out how to dance in the spaces between the lines.

Keep growing my friend,

Gail

Tagged as: Aging, dreamer, dreams, legacies, Midlife, perfection, shades of gray