As humans, we are always looking for perfection. We look for perfection within us, and when we make mistakes we often beat ourselves about it. Also we are always expecting others around us to be perfect, and when they are not, we are disappointed.
I wonder who taught us or told us that we need to be ‘perfect’ in the first place. This is interesting to me cause it gives birth to a whole new phenomenon, i.e ‘The Perfect Parent’ and ‘The Perfect Child’ .
I wrote in my last column how no parent is perfect or even meant to be perfect. However, I didn’t focus enough on the advantages of being imperfect, having your own little nuances and how much it does for us and for the people we love.
‘Wabi-Sabi’ is the Japanese Art of finding the beauty in imperfections.
There is a story about this woman, who carried two buckets of water from the lake to her house everyday, but because the old bucket had a hole, she only had 1.5 bucket of water back with her every day. The old bucket tried to apologize to her for this, but then she showed the bucket the path full of flowers it created for her daily journey, accidentally, but only because of its’ imperfection.
Hence, I am trying to stress on the fact that, not only you need not be a perfect parent, but you also need to learn to embrace your imperfection along with your partners imperfection. Cause at the end of the day that way you will both leave behind a beautiful path for your child to walk on.
Your child is not expecting you to be perfect parents either. Who knows what your children are benefiting from all those imperfections.
More importantly, while you are doing that, you are also teaching your child to enjoy and embrace imperfections instead of always striving to be perfect while in distress with your current self and others. I believe that is a beautiful lesson that we can teach our children.
What will matter most to our children in the long run is the intention behind our actions, and that is something we all could work on.
As long as we have the right intent, in one way or another we will raise beautiful children.
It is also really important for our children to see us comfortable with our imperfections, to be able to be imperfect themselves. Hence the first step for us is to appreciate our own imperfect selves, before we can start cherishing everyone else’s.
The best part is, it will not only help us create a beautiful path, full of flowers for our children but also teach us not to strive to raise a ‘perfect child’ which makes both ‘parenting’ and ‘childhood, stress free.
“Look beyond perfection ! Value the intent”
Let’s start 2024 being our own imperfect selves while giving space for others to be the same.
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.png "Dr Bijaya Mishara")
.png "Niladri Sekhar Parial")
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