"When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky." ~ Buddha
The perfect day is possible even if nothing in the day was perfect.
How can this be? Perfection is hinged on what 'is' not what 'should have been'. Nothing is inherently good or bad, right or wrong. Rather, it is the ideal we hold that creates imperfection. Without that ideal imperfection is impossible. This leaves us with two choices. We can continue spending our lives striving for the ideal and never achieving it or we can get rid of the ideal altogether.
My life doesn’t look anything like I planned. I tabled my psychology career after getting cancer for the second time. It had been my dream to help people. But in the moment, psychology as I had learned it, did not help me. There was something more. My calling took me beyond psychology. And I am so grateful . Despite all the good that has come into my life since my illnesses, the failure to get my license after umpteen years of study, hard work and great expense never stopped plaguing me. My life was not a success but a failure to live up to my own expectations.
The expectations I held for success remained unchanged and I berated and judged myself all the while. I thought about what should have been, chided myself for giving up, held out the possibility that one day I would complete what I had started so I could make myself whole. One day I woke up (probably literally and figuratively) and realized that I could change the criteria for success or throw the idea of success out entirely. After all, to hold success as something I had yet to achieve, was the only thing standing in the way of my success right now. In a moment, lifelong regret was transformed into perfection. I was perfect.
Many are concerned to ‘lower their expectations’ of themselves or others for fear that they will slack off, spiral into oblivion, never get off the couch. But that is not the case. Rather than pushing ourselves through life so we can attain some elusive idea of success, we become unburdened, liberated, joyful. Life becomes a series of choices and opportunities not predictions, ‘shoulds’ and ‘have tos’. Ending the internal comparison of myself to my metrics has finally allowed me to enjoy my Self. What a relief to not have to improve, push or fight myself or life any longer.
Success is me. Perfection is me. And it is you too. NOW. Not when or if but NOW. There are no criteria for perfection or success. Imagine that.
So how do you have the perfect day? Don’t lower your standards, give up standards entirely. You will never be nor could you be a disappointment to yourself. Be with what is. Be curious, stay out of resistance, approach the things you hate to do differently. Let go of all the meaning tasks once held for you.
When I go to bed at night I revel in my perfect day as a whole. I do not pick it apart saying this was good and this was bad. When I experience joy it is causeless. When I have gratitude it is not for anything specific. It is just gratitude for the whole. All that is. When I wake up in the morning, I am energized knowing that today is going to be a perfect day. Indeed it already is.
This is divine perfection. Unconditional. Peaceful. Perfect.
Enjoy your perfect self on this most perfect day,
xoxo Jill
For more on the topic, here is an amazing poem recited, yes, to perfection....