Vol. 81 - Perfect is Nothing

On not getting in the way of good

My son loves to draw. He loves to color. He loves to create art. It's something Emily and I hope he carries with him for the rest of his life. 

But recently, he spent nearly the whole of an early morning inconsolable because he couldn't draw Fly Guy, one of his favorite children's book characters, perfectly. 

Emily and I tried our best to explain that there's no such thing as perfect, especially when it comes to art. We tried to explain that art is a product of each artist, of how they view and filter the world. How even if he copies Fly Guy perfectly, it will still be his version of Fly Guy. And that version will be perfect because it’s his. We tried to explain how we need to embrace imperfection because it’s what makes us us; how each person is his or her own person, how each of our life experiences is different, and what amazing things that results in. We explained how boring the world would be if art were “perfect.” We explained how imperfection can also be defined as character. We also explained that perfect is nothing more than a construct. We explained that creating something is meant to be fun, even when it involves tons of hard work. We explained to him how I've been making music for three decades and I've still created nothing anywhere near perfect. And how sometimes, people pay me a lot of money to write stories, and never once have any of my stories come anywhere close to being perfect. And that brought us back again to the point that nothing is perfect, that perfection is impossible. We explained how the only perfect things in our lives were him and his sister but even they had their little uniquenesses and that's what made them them. We explained how, to us, those things are what made them perfect. We explained that the only perfection is imperfection and that he was chasing an ideal that didn't exist. We explained how he should try to embrace his version of Fly Guy as the perfect iteration of his version of Fly Guy.

But he wanted none of it. He only wanted to be able to draw Fly Guy exactly as he saw him on the page.

And so we tried and tried again, even resorting to tracing paper, which he insisted was cheating (even though I told him to think of it more like practice). Eventually he calmed down enough to accept a final version of Fly Guy, one that was pretty damn close to Ted Arnold’s versions of the character. One that was almost perfect.

I’m not a perfect dad. Far from it. I don’t think such a person exists. Because perfection isn’t real. But I try my best to do my job perfectly, hoping that, if I strive for perfection, I’ll land somewhere amongst the “pretty good.” And if I can be a pretty good dad to my kids, I think I’ll have done a fine job. So maybe there is something to the idea of perfection, at least the part where you chase it.

So long as we realize it’s not something we’ll ever attain, maybe there’s nothing at all wrong with trying to be perfect. And in that sense, maybe my little boy is right. Maybe there’s a lot more I can learn from him than I give him credit for.