One of the leading brands of cotton dresses in india caution customers when they buy it that there would be imperfections in their product and that is the way it happens in hand woven items. Similarly I live in a green gated community. When I had once raised some imperfections in my house design, my architect reminded me that imperfection is the beauty of nature.

Nature teaches us to adapt and enjoy life as it is and not as the way we want it to be. If you drive down a forest and watch the trees on both sides, they look green and pretty. But no two trees look alike although they have may have been sown at the same time and may be by the same person.

Life is no different. It evolves for each of us the way we may least expect. There are two things in life, which makes living difficult. The first is our innate tendency to compare and the other is to have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and of others.

Today I thought it may be worth while to explore as to how to live life the imperfect way. If nature can evolve this way, be imperfect and still all of us enjoy it, why not we live similarly. How do we learn to live life imperfectly, perfect ?

Many of us tend to spend our entire life looking for perfection. Searching for imperfections and attempting to make them perfect becomes our mission in life. In this process, we forget to live and enjoy life every day.

One of my friends is a perfect man. He graduated from a prestigious engineering college and completed his post graduation from one of the best business schools in our country. He has had a good career and has an enviable family with a smart spouse and a daughter who is also studying a leading medical school.

Everyone around would think this person would be living a perfect live. However, what I have seen and heard is otherwise. He is still searching for perfection in his life. He wants everything to be perfect in life and thereby a slight imperfection makes him yell at everyone around him. Now, I realise that how difficult it is for us to live with imperfections. The day we accept life as a mixed bag, we may enjoy it more than we are doing today.

In this process, what they do not realise is that neither do they enjoy life, nor allow others around them to enjoy. Most people do not like to interact with them since they are obsessed and are not willing to accept anyone with even minor faults.. Ultimately, they lead lonely lives.

While there may be nothing wrong in aiming for perfection in everything we do every day, if we spend our whole life in search of that elusive perfection, we may realise some day that it never existed and that may be too late to enjoy life.

So, one learning and insight today for me is to live life imperfectly perfect. While we may aim to do our best in everything we do, we need to accept that neither we nor others around us are perfect in every way. The day we realise this basic theorem of life, life may be fun and different for us.

As in the photo above this flower may not be symmetrical but its beauty lies in its asymmetry.

Let us learn to live life the way it evolves every day and learn to enjoy it that way.

S Ramesh Shankar

21st February 2021