1600 Days: Day 8
Ceaseless striving after perfection
How reasonable is it to hope for perfection? How beneficial is that degree of hopefulness and aspiration, and how does it fare in the balancing act against the dangers of becoming unrealistic—either too pollyanna and too sure of the power of theodicy, or so obsessed with an unreachable standard that the distance between where you are and that unforgiving reference point becomes a source of despair?
I’ve been pondering that lately, because it’s important to start steadily raising my expectations for myself, and even for the people around me—from my own family, to my friends and neighbors and fellow churchgoers and my kids’ friends’ parents and the American electorate. Yet, it’s also clear that raising those expectations carries some risk. The universe is an entropy machine. It’s always working toward low-energy states that don’t require urgent change. Anything approaching a state of perfection—any raised standard, any harder (even if nobler) way of life—is a high-energy state, and I get nervous around it. I don’t want to give entropy too big a target to aim at.
Thus, a lot of my reading (when I summon the focus and find the impetus to do real reading, as opposed to sliding by on TV shows and podcasts and old baseball games on YouTube) is about finding the courage to try for more. I’m always choosy about the sources I turn to for that, though, because I loathe most new-age self-help books. They tend to be trite, smug, ineffective, and overpoweringly lame. There are exceptions, but not enough of them for me to spend time splashing much in that pool.
Instead, right now, I’m wading through Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. It is long and occasionally a bit dense and pretty imposing. Gandhi, like a lot of the people who have achieved great things, was intimidatingly ascetic, and it stresses me out. Self-denial is an important part of self-improvement, but many of the people we were raised to consider Great Men were extremists about it. Some of them, I find trustworthy and interesting. Others, I find to be (as the kids say) a bit extra. Gandhi runs toward the latter, for me, in terms of his observance of austere personal habits. I have great respect for the way he turned that discipline toward huge, important things beyond himself, of course, but hearing him describe his own tenacity about it makes me border on that despair.
He offers words of hope even for those struggling to keep up with his unforgiving standards, though. He’s stern about it, but I find some encouragement in his perpetual reflections on his own failures. He’s not defeated by them, though neither is he flippant about them. He just repeats to his reader that “There must, therefore, be ceaseless striving after perfection.” It’s a lot to ask. But aiming for it is probably more good than bad.
Song of the Day: Refugee, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
No particular reason. It just really goes hard, especially if you let yourself meditate on the line “Everybody’s had to fight to be free.”