It's OK To Be On Your Way

Last month, my husband and I took a much-needed vacation to Jamaica. We stayed at a Sandals Resort in Montego Bay. Prior to leaving, we saw a myriad of ads for the resort, and they were full of the same thing: a couple in their 20s with six-pack abs and a rockin’ tan.

I laugh because now that I’ve been to the resort, I can affirm that the people on the island DO NOT look like that. And the best part is, they didn’t care! They were on vacation and loving every minute of it, belly and all.

This was a story I told in my presentation last week, Get REAL: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. It’s human nature to chase perfection, and it’s all around us. As a society, that’s what we’re shown as “ideal.” If it wasn’t, we would see far fewer ads like the ones from Sandals.

I’ve been re-reading the book Zen and the Art of Happiness by Chris Prentiss, and I recall a story from the author. Twenty years before writing the book, he bought a new car and parked it in the alley next to his house. He was walking out when he saw an old VW bus scrape the fender. The driver got out, threw his hat on the ground and hung his head, holding it in his hands. He obviously had no money to pay for the damage, and his wife was in the car with their son in the back seat.

When the man saw Prentiss coming, he looked even more distraught. Prentiss walked up to him and said, “Perfect. That’s just what my car needed.” According to Prentiss, he never fixed the damage because it served as a reminder of his belief that the world is perfect as it is.

To many of us, that probably sounds like baloney. We focus on the things we wish we could change or improve to fit the ideal in our minds. We think we need to be something more: thinner, wiser, better friends, better parents, better spouses.

I feel pressure all the time to be more and do more, especially as a business owner. I know what happens to my confidence when I start measuring myself against some version of what I think I’m supposed to be, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. There are expectations around what success, happiness and even our lives are supposed to look like, and it’s difficult not to absorb some of them.

No one has it all. We all deal with less than ideal, and we all experience self-doubt, worry and fear. I am guilty of spending a lot of time there myself.

The question I was wrestling with when I originally wrote this was a big one: What if we really did subscribe to the belief that everything, including us, is already perfect?

I’m not sure I would use the word perfect today. There are things that happen to us that I would never describe that way. There are things about myself I genuinely want to change, mistakes I’ve made that I needed to learn from, and circumstances I would change if I could. But I still recognize what I was reaching for.

What would change if I stopped treating every unfinished part of myself as evidence that something was wrong with me? What if being on my way counted for something, even when I hadn’t arrived where I thought I should be?

That feels more honest to me than perfection. I am still a work in progress, and I suspect I always will be. The difference is that I don’t think progress requires me to dislike the person who hasn’t gotten there yet.

“All we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts, and it is made up of our thoughts.”
—The Dhammapada