Being perfect

When I was a little girl I believed that adults were perfect, they had arrived, adults didn't make mistakes, adults had their life sorted out, adults were happy. 

As I grew older I kept waiting for the time when that would start, and every time I made a mistake as a teenager I would think about how many years left I had to make mistakes before I had to get it right always.

Then I realised that as the years went by I never stopped making mistakes, in fact now my mistakes had bigger ramifications, so in my mind my mistakes were bigger, I had more responsibility, more power and more ability to create, move and impact, yet with that my ability to mess up and my fear of messing up grew. 

What I know now is that happiness/ perfection is not a destination, it’s a journey. 

There was once a mountain climber who wanted to climb the most dangerous, highest mountain in the world. No one had ever reached its peak. He trained for years, he studied the terrain, and he tried and failed many times until one day he made it to the top. As he got to the peek he saw a child sitting calmly on top of the mountain. He was so disappointed with himself, how come I had to work so hard to get here when even a small child can climb the mountain easily.

'There must be something wrong with me, I must be doing something wrong,' he thought. He turned to the child and said, 'how did you do this? How did you get here?'

The child replied, ‘I was born here.’

In life we often look at others who we think are on top of the mountain and compare ourselves to them. We wonder why we are not where they are, their lives look perfect, they look happy and we wonder what is wrong with us because we are not where they are.

The truth is that by human nature, whenever a person reaches a goal that they have worked hard for they are never satisfied, reaching the goal only opens up more doors for them and greater goals, and we never reach a place that we feel truly satisfied, (unless we learn to be satisfied with what we have, who we are and where we are right now – and at the same time strive for more – holding the tension of opposites). Focusing only on the destination means that we are always going to feel like we are not good enough or don't have enough. (When a person feels that they are not good enough they will always be defensive on some level – which leads to the inability to live wholeheartedly and connect to others and themselves)

What we don’t see though is the journey that each person takes, we don’t see what they struggle with and we don’t see what they think and feel in their heart.

It’s not important where you start from (what talents or struggles you were born with) or where you get to (external accomplishments). What's important is how many steps you take. 

Every person has their place and purpose. Saying that one is more important than another is like saying your hands are more important than your feet. They are both needed, they both have a purpose and without either of them the body is not complete. So too every person and and every job is needed to make the world complete. However hard a hand tries to be a foot it will never manage to do as good of a job as a foot trying to be the damn best foot it can be.

The place we need to start is by recognising who we are and where we are. Knowing that there will always be people who have bigger struggles than you and people who are more successful than you at overcoming their struggles, you are on an infinite spectrum.

Start where you are and take the very next step you need to take, in order to develop the parts of you that need to grow, to be a better you. Do this, instead of looking at something that isn't you and wishing it could be. 

(Based on chapter 2 Tanya)