Perfectly Imperfect: Life is One Continuous Mistake

 

By Gerry Rickard

 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

As a meditation teacher I often see how practitioners almost always want perfection in their practice.

This just doesn’t apply to beginners; many who have had a long-term practice can struggle with not getting it “right.” For beginners it often centres around the fact that they can’t stay with the breath, or that thoughts keep coming, or that their meditation practice isn’t “good.” For those who have meditated a little longer, there is often a sense of frustration about lack of “progress” and that their practice should be getting “better”.

Imperfection isn’t allowed in our fast-moving, ambitious, consumerist society. We must always be the perfect mom/husband/employee/student. We want to be perfectionists in everything that we do. Pressure is continual from parents, educational institutions, bosses, religion—the whole potpourri of societal influences—all pushing us to perfection.

Buddhism helps us get a clearer view on all of this and this is what I try to impart when I teach—that mistakes and imperfection are part of our ordinary, vulnerable, human lives.

Dōgen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen, talked about “succeeding wrong with wrong” (shoshaku jushaku) or fixing a mistake with another mistake. Shunryu Suzuki, the writer of the Zen classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, famously said that this phrase reflected the life of a zen master as having a life of “one continuous mistake.”

Basically, all of this means that we can never learn anything if we don’t make mistakes. We are all like zen masters; we screw up again and again until we eventually learn something. Making these mistakes is key to learning. We also learn by accepting our imperfections and vulnerabilities as part of our lives and our practice. We don’t need to see them as ‘mistakes’ that we need to ‘correct’.

It is important not to be down on ourselves when we make mistakes in our personal lives, or judge our practice. We need to be able to forgive ourselves, and let go of the stuff that can bog us down if we keep reliving our past mistakes. This doesn’t mean that we forget about them. It simply means that we learn from them and move on, vowing never again to make the same mistake twice.

This is our practice.

We can compare it to the judo artist who learns how to fall properly. We can learn from every fall, embrace them and see life as a learning process of how to fall and get back up over and over again.

“The Zen approach is not about avoiding mistakes, but bringing our errors to the path. Making a mistake opens the tenderness in us and can be more helpful than not making one.” Robert Reese

Wabi-Sabi

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is a beautiful way of looking at our imperfections. Wabi-sabi celebrates imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence, corrosion and decay. It is in the beauty of a mouldy prayer flag; a worn ornament, a chip or crack in a vase—all making the objects more interesting and more real in the beauty of their imperfection. It celebrates handmade items in all their earthiness and non-purity. We celebrate this artform by accepting things just the way they are, without wanting them to be different, perfect, sleek, modern, or whole.

Many would highlight the ugliness in all of this, abandoning it for something shiny, new and mass-produced. But there’s something else present when we observe a decaying tree trunk on the forest floor, a rusting, empty tin on the street or a creaky stairway worn down from years of use.

This, too, is reflected in our transient, impermanent and ever-changing lives. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course, borrowed a phrase from Zorba the Greek, calling it life’s “full catastrophe.” We are all here on this earth for a short while, like the flower in full bloom, before getting older, succumbing to sickness and old age and then leaving this earth in our physical form.

Our practice should also celebrate our imperfections—our willingness to accept ourselves as we are, imperfections and mistakes included. We must sit with all that is here-–-whatever is here, independent of our liking or disliking what is present. This is true meditation.

“Things that exist are imperfect. Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in that imperfection is perfect reality.” Shunryu Suzuki

Kintsugi art

The Japanese art form of kintsugi embraces the spirit of wabi-sabi whereby broken pottery is put back together and the cracks and joins highlighted with gold. They become more appreciated and more valuable because of their imperfections, highlighting the cracks and scars of their repair.

So too can we appreciate our own lives by embracing our so-called imperfections, weaknesses and failures. In doing this we celebrate our wholeness, our unique beauty and our resilience. We are not broken. We are the perfection of who we already are, complete with all our faults and blemishes. We make something beautiful out of this.

As Rumi wrote: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

Life is one continuous mistake because this reflects our lives. In this way, kintsugi embraces authenticity and imperfections creating, in turn, a stronger, more beautiful and resilient piece of art. Our lives and practice can reflect this. We sit with what is here in acceptance, because this is what is here. Only in facing, allowing and acknowledging what is here in this moment, can we change.

As Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in No Mud, no Lotus, “If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses.”

 

Gerry Rickard is an Irishman living in Mozambique. He has a Masters in Teaching Mindfulness from the University of Bangor in Wales, and now teaches, leads retreats and online sessions in Mozambique and beyond. A practicing Zen Buddhist he recently stitched his first ever stitch and completed his first rakusu in preparation for taking precepts with Upaya Zen Centre.

 

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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