State (Static) View of Perfection
As a perfectionist, you think of perfection as a state. As you clean your kitchen or your car or your desk, you fantasize about preserving the state of perfection that you have accomplished. If you can only get it right, then it’ll remain perfect from then on. You believe that by tinkering with what is, by tweaking the reality, you can engineer a perfect or near-perfect state of reality that will enable lasting happiness and well-being. But remodeling reality is a frustrating prospect because reality isn’t a state. Reality is change, a process, a constant flux. As a perfectionist, you reject this impermanence and yearn for a perfect status quo. This state view of perfection is an emotional set up: even when you achieve that momentary perfect state, the reality doesn’t pause to allow you to enjoy it – the moment of accomplishment evaporates as soon as it materializes. What am I telling you? You already know it.
Attachment to Permanence is Suffering
Buddhists call the impermanence of reality anitya. Physicists call it entropy. The former witness it, the latter try to control it. Both accept it. But not you. You strive to shape and form reality into what it isn’t. You see the natural flow of change as de-formation – as a frustrating loss of form rather than as a natural change of form. You’d rather solidify the river of change into an immutable state of perfection and freeze it in time, than to flow with it. In trying to fix the imperfections of reality, you are confusing fluidity with flaws and the natural rusting with decay. You are, in a manner of speaking, a permanist. Trying to cast an anchor of permanence in a bottomless ocean of change, trying to attach your well-being to what once was creates attachment. Attachment isn’t only a loss of contentment, it’s also a loss of independence. By making your well-being dependent on the perfect circumstance, you lose the sovereignty of your well-being. Your inner life becomes dependent on the external, on that perfect state of affairs that you absolutely have to preserve. You become rigid and tighten up like an anchor chain without enough slack to deal with the ebb and flow of life. No wonder that sometimes, under this tension, you snap.
Process (Dynamic) View of Perfection
Say, you reach that final state of completion, that ultimate state of perfection that cannot be improved upon. Then what? Where do you go from that dead-end? The ideal perfection is the end of the line. Nothing follows it, nothing but emptiness. That’s why when you feel you’ve have finally reached the pinnacle, immediately after the triumph, there is a feeling of emptiness. A process view of perfection has no dead-ends. It’s just a way. It’s open-ended. You go from one moment of perfection to another and on to another. The process view allows you to see your entire life as an unfolding work in progress, as an ever-changing blossoming of perfection. In a process view of perfection, failure is not an option. No, not in that perfectionistic sense of “you can’t afford to fail!” But in the sense that you are always succeeding since you are always doing your best. After all, one of the meanings of the verb “to succeed” is nothing other than “to follow;” not “to do better” but merely “to be next.” On a recent tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, the tour guide said that when Wright was asked “What is your best work?” he reportedly answered “My next one.” Wright, no doubt, understood the logic of flow. In a process view of perfection, you are always realizing your potential. No, not in that perfectionistic sense of trying to be better than you are at any given moment in time. No. You realize your potential by realizing that, at all times, you are realized, fully and completely. The process view of perfection sees perfection as a one-way evolutionary process of growing.
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WOW! and WOW! again. I will print this out and read it whenever I strive for perfection.
Well done! You have planted the seed for a profound change in my current thinking process.
Thank you.
Thanks, Sonia, for your feedback. I wish you well!
I disagree about the goal of striving for perfection — being a perfectionist. Most of us mere mortals realize we’re never, ever, going to get there. However, the journey of self-improvement, of personal best, of watching yourself test and go beyond the limits of what you thought were possible — that’s the beauty of striving. As a writer, I try to write the perfect book, but I never, ever reread a book I’ve published once it’s in press. I am too frustrated by the urge to tinker with it; an urge that is structurally impossible. That doesn’t mean, though, that the next one can’t be even better.
And everyone once in a while, someone achieves something that is as close to perfect as can be. Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. The Mona Lisa. Chekhov’s UNCLE VANYA. Michael Phelps in the last Olympics. Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE.
What follows achievements like this is not emptiness. What follows is awe that can last for centuries.
I don’t know about you, but for my limited time on this planet? Perfect is something to strive for. I won’t get there, but I’ll be a helluva better than if I never tried.
Hi, Dr. Somov -
Maybe I’m the exception to TPG’s take on the goal of perfectionists . . . for me, I have always had the underlying hunger to arrange my life, my world, myself perfectly and then to preserve that state. So, I would have to say that you (Dr. Somov) have described my “usual” way of thinking very accurately.
And because of that, it is easy for me to follow your logic and see another possible way of being. Thank you for opening that door for me.
- Marie (Coming Out of the Trees)
You are very welcome, Marie. Wish you well!
TPG: thank you for your thoughtful input. What we feel we accomplish in our pursuit of perfection depends on how we define perfection. In “Present Perfect” I forward a thesis that perfection is not only attainable but is inevitable! I wish you well!
Dr. Somov –
I wish that Publishers Weekly had agreed with you when they reviewed my last novel! 
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
Dear TPG,
Don’t be too hard on yourself. You are successful.
I have had two books published by a mainstream publishing company (they sold well) – they were nowhere near perfect, but I am very proud of them. I once wrote the perfect university assignment and got 100%, and that has caused me so much grief, because I now feel I have to get 100% in everything or I am a failure. After much reflection a distinction is great and a credit is acceptable.
It’s all evanescent.
There’s a Chasidic saying — everyone should walk around with a piece of paper in each pocket, and pull out the paper for the appropriate occasion. The paper in the left pocket has written on it: The world was created for me. The paper in the right pocket: I am ashes and dust.
I got sober about writing when discovered the works of Stefan Zweig and Booth Tarkington. Each was the leading novelist of his day. Today? Barely anyone knows their names. Sigh.
Yesss, you’ve hit the nail right on the head, this notion that somehow perfection has to be a permanent state of being is the clincher for ‘perfectionists’ like me, it makes me think that my life is out of control when the cupboard is a bit mussed up, or the bills are yet to be filed. Every sorting out of the closet, cupboard files is assumed to be perch from which i never need get off, but of course that is not possible. I’ve learnt now to breathe easy, and not think i am a fraud because i haven’t met with some unreal notion of perfection and thinking of it as some kind of end point, there is no end point.
The kind of perfection TPG refers to is really also a process, no one who creates a mona lisa or uncle vanya is assuming that the process is over. There is no end point and within a certain combination of time and space perfection happens, and yet, we cannot be too sure whether the creators of those works were thinking in terms of perfection at all, somehow to describe such works as perfect is to diminish their greatness.
Thank you for your valuable thoughts, Vyuti. You have made many great points in your post. Much appreciated. Be well.
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