Give Thanks~Feel Joyful WK 6- Life's Imperfections


I GIVE THANKS FOR LIFE’S IMPERFECTIONS

We really do need to be thankful that life is full of imperfections. This subject was brought to my attention last week when I looked at my Peace Lily- I only have one Peace Lily & 3 baby Cacti in a triple tray on top of the microwave- they’re quite safe I promise! The Lily, I named Robo- a derivative of robust seeing my last houseplant died and I'm persuading Robo to do better, has a very poorly leaf. In fact, the leaf is literally half dead so I was contemplating cutting it off and then I thought about the other part which is very obviously half alive! I would have to cut through the living tissue to remove the dead and that seemed a little painful so I sat back and considered the implications of this instead.

Imperfection is what makes this a perfect world and therefore we need to give thanks for it. If this were not so we would be a very sorry human race indeed. Where the leaf is concerned something went wrong otherwise it would have withered and fallen, instead of which it is actually very healthy in part, providing an excellent, direct comparison with us as people. Not one of us can profess to be perfect and there are parts of our past that we would dearly love to eliminate. Not being biblical here by talking about sin, but I am speaking about our personal conscience. Last week we looked at identifying our talents. At the same time we need to identify our moral standing so we know what is acceptable to us and what is not. Once we have a firm moral ground our thoughts, words and actions are either in or out of sync. They will meet with our approval or, alternatively, make us feel ill at ease and maybe resentful of our behaviour: possibly we fail to understand why we did what we did! This is not a good place to be but being a human trait we will go there from time to time simply because we are free to make choices.


So why choose not to cut that ‘bad’ part of our lives off? The answer is, at that point in time for some unknown reason we needed to do what we did and may well have learnt a new lesson because of it. Very often we repeat certain behaviours, so need to learn new patterns that enable our lives to ‘bloom’ again.

Imperfection adds the ‘interest’ factor to our personalities. If you study supermodels many of them have flaws which are regarded as quaint or appealing- very often the most obvious candidates are passed over for a more individual look. Different is good and imperfection makes us interesting.

Bad boy turned good is always a wonderful story but unfortunately most women cannot change the bad boy and would be better off without him! Imperfections often play a part in helping us find our way in the world. This is why youngsters do so many things that adults have warned them against. The ‘battle scars’ they acquire either internally or externally add character and often provide memories of a daring youth; a time when they felt very alive, the feelings adding value to life despite their actions being socially unacceptable.

Imperfections can give rise to amazing discoveries. Accidents have accounted for quite a bit of our scientific understanding of the world- amazing new recipes, great works of art and sometimes the discovery of our own talents. Doing things by accident rather than by design can transform your life. I have created my current life pretty much by accident as I had no knowledge of the internet and was researching a couple of people. The net said ‘do you want to join Myspace?’ So I did and in many ways completely upset life as I knew it by paying too much attention to this new world and not enough on the domestic front. Yes, that was definitely a huge blemish in my life at the time- the equivalent of the dead leaf, but all finally worked out well and I have a new direction in life as a result. Had I stopped using the net to keep the peace things would be very different and considerably less stimulating!

So give thanks for imperfections. You can accept others as equals because we are all imperfect, you can make mistakes and the world will still turn, you might discover something quite remarkable through error and finally, imperfection adds interest to life itself and everything in our universe.

Jaz McKenzie




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