I have spent a considerable portion of my life trying to fix things. Computers. Cars. Photographs. Problems. Other people. Myself.
The computers usually deserved it.
Teenage Jason was being evaluated constantly. Too tall. Awkward. Bad at basketball. Smaller feet than expected. Poor coordination. Other kids made fun of me. Yet the exact same supposedly defective body worked quite well when I found football.
Nothing necessarily needed to be fixed. I just needed to find where I fit.
Sometimes what looks like a flaw in one environment becomes an advantage in another. I may intimidate people in an average interaction simply because I’m a big guy, but I become a fucking saint when someone is trying to climb the shelves at the grocery store to reach something on the top shelf and I come walking down the aisle.
My height didn’t change between basketball and football.
The context did.
I’ve had to learn that lesson in other parts of my life too.
When my boys were young, I deliberately tried to be a different kind of father. I recognized that I had a temper, so we created “kitty” as a safe word they could use when I was getting too angry. Then one day my son used it exactly as intended and I responded:
“There is no kitty here!”
Not exactly my finest parenting moment.
But the important realization from my Direction post was that one failure didn’t erase years of trying to be a good father.
I fucked up. That’s different from being a fuckup.
I can do something badly without becoming a bad person. I can fail as a father in a moment without being a failure as a father.
Professionally, I’ve had to learn something similar.
When I started teaching and advising through the SBDC, I didn’t know everything. Not even close. Eventually, I became comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I can figure it out.”
That’s accepting imperfection professionally.
There’s enormous pressure in professional environments to appear knowledgeable, but experience has taught me that competence doesn’t require omniscience. Being good at something doesn’t mean knowing everything about it. Sometimes it means being comfortable enough to admit what you don’t know and confident enough to go find the answer.
Writing has been another version of that lesson.
Historically, writing has made me anxious. Sentence structure, spelling, articulation, whether I’m expressing myself correctly… it can all be a bit much. Yet here I am publishing something almost every day.
As you are reading this, I’m actually currently camping with my girlfriend. I’ve scheduled this post so I can keep my one-word-a-day goal going while I’m outside enjoying nature instead of sitting in front of a computer obsessing over whether every sentence is perfect.
That’s probably progress in itself.
I didn’t start writing because I’ve suddenly become convinced I’m Ernest Hemingway. I write because I have something to say. It may have started as a journal for sorting through my own thoughts, but somewhere along the way it became something more than I originally intended.
Somewhere in this post there is probably a grammatical error. A few months ago that would have bothered me considerably more than it does today. Please don’t email me when you find it.
I’ve also had to become comfortable with imperfection in the way I look backward.
Losing someone can make it tempting to polish the memories until all the rough edges disappear. But thirty-two years of marriage wasn’t perfect because no thirty-two years of anything could possibly be perfect. There were beautiful moments and difficult ones. Arguments and laughter. Good decisions and terrible ones.
That’s not a criticism of what we had. That’s evidence that it was real.
Maybe that’s part of what I’m finally understanding about imperfection. Something doesn’t have to be perfect to be valuable. A marriage doesn’t have to be perfect to have been filled with love. A father doesn’t have to get every moment right to be a good dad. I don’t have to know every answer to be good at my job, and a blog post doesn’t have to be grammatically flawless to be worth writing.
Photography should have taught me this a long time ago.
Photographers have this wonderful ability to take a perfectly good photograph, blow it up to 100% on a computer screen, and immediately start looking for everything that’s wrong with it.
Is the eye perfectly sharp?
Is there noise in the shadows?
Did I miss focus slightly?
What’s that thing in the background?
We can take an image that looks beautiful as a whole and magnify it until all we can see are its flaws.
I wonder how often I’ve done the same thing to myself.
Zoom in far enough and there’s plenty to find. I’ve made bad decisions. I’ve said the wrong thing. I’ve hurt people. I’ve failed. I’ve lost my temper. I’ve started things I didn’t finish. I’ve stayed with some things too long. I’ve worried too much about things that didn’t matter and occasionally not enough about things that did.
At 100% magnification, I’m kind of a mess.
But that’s not the whole photograph.
Maybe I’ve spent too much of my life examining myself at 200%, identifying every defect and immediately opening a mental repair ticket.
Some things absolutely need work. Some things need an apology. Some things need practice. Some things need to change.
But maybe some things don’t need fixing at all.
Maybe some things need acceptance.
Maybe some things deserve a little laughter.
And maybe some things are simply part of me.
After all, this whole blog is supposed to be about evolution. The funny thing is, evolution doesn’t produce perfection.
It produces adaptation.
There isn’t going to be some final version of Jason where all the bugs have been removed, every bad habit has been corrected, every insecurity has disappeared, and I finally receive a notification that says:
Congratulations. Installation of Jason 2.0 is complete.
That’s probably a good thing.
I’m still learning. Still changing. Still adapting. There are a few bugs I’m working on, several questionable features I don’t completely understand, and at least a couple of known issues the developer has apparently decided not to address. But maybe I don’t need to inspect every one of them today.
Sometimes I just need to back away from the screen and look at the whole picture.
It’s imperfect.
So am I.
And from a reasonable viewing distance, I think we’re both looking pretty damn good.