"Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal them selves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity."
From The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
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This passage is helping me to shift my thinking to something far more productive than the seemingly endless brain freeze I've experienced over the last few weeks. It’s been one internal conversation after another of “How about this? No, not that. Well how about this? No, no that either?” Etc. etc, over and over. The unfortunate and seemingly conventional wisdom appears to be that tragedy needs to strike in order for needed change to occur. Tragedy has certainly struck, and continues to every day, and so much of what can be better about the world, our communities, and ourselves, lays bare before us. From my end anyway, it has been an anxiety provoking and intense accelerator of a non-linear and jagged visioning process for what kind of world I’d like to live in. President Obama once said “We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back, and that’s O.K.” For me, one question that helps keep it in perspective, that my 3 year old daughter helps me ask, that keeps me aware of what “the whole” even is, is what kind of world I’d like for her to live in and how can I contribute to it? Some parts of that answer? One in which people are uplifted by one another, not torn down by one another. One in which the value and inherent potential of every person is respected, far more than it has been in the past. One in which every individual feel their inherent agency over their own life and don't feel bound to a pre-determined future. The answer to this question and the achieving of this ideal might come in the form of a dizzying amount of zigging and zagging, but reminding myself that that’s part of the process, makes overcoming the anxiety of the question, a bit more manageable.
The (cured) MEAT + 3 is just a vehicle, like food itself, to start or continue a conversation and, hopefully, provide nourishment in the process.
Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Charlito |
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