Okay, I am laughing at myself right now because I had a blog post with quite the word count going, and I accidentally clicked a button on my browser that took me to a completely different page. I hit the 'back' button, thinking that the "draft autosave" would have kept my words in the cache.
Yeah, right.
What met my eyes instead was a blank text editor with just the title of my post.
This Homer Simpson "D'OH!" moment was brought to you by this one lesson:
Don't expect perfect results from your efforts every time, especially on this planet, 'cause you ain't gonna get it.
If things don't turn out according to plan, who's keeping score, anyway? You? Your parents? Grandparents? Neighbors? Yeah, they're all just waiting for you to screw up, aren't they?
But what if they're not? What if it's all in your mind, this incessant drive to do things right all the time and never make mistakes, never mess up? That sort of thinking can lead you down the road to extinction...a supposed mistake in a piece of DNA code, for example, could be a blessing in disguise...an adaptation that helps your end of the gene pool learn to survive on this planet even better than before.
So even if our mistakes make us look funny, shouldn't we be the first ones to laugh at ourselves? Not so much to beat others to the punch, but to laugh at how idiotic we can be by thinking that mistake should never have been made.
Yeah, sure, we all want things to come out right, like our attempts at a difficult recipe. But what if we don't have the recommended ingredients, yet have substitutes that would work just as well? Or if we think one ingredient is the same as another and we discover that we were wrong--yet it works in a fairly similar way, just not in the way that the recipe recommends?
I would think that sort of instance is a good way of learning to adapt and think on one's feet, instead of whining and crying about how our recipe doesn't look precisely the way it does in the cookbook or magazine. I think of it this way, when it comes to cooking...as long as it tastes good, as well as looks good, then why should it matter if the recipe's not followed to the letter? If the general intent is there, despite the substitutions, then people will most likely dig in and munch.
Meaning that, in other situations, if you did your best at something, most people will accept that it is your best, for the time being, and not have a major problem with your efforts. So it's not really worth spending the extra energy beating yourself up for things not going according to plan--especially if you know you did your best.
Yeah, I know. There *are* people that try to keep score, just because they're more interested in being right than being happy.
Which tells us that they got taught to feel insecure about their own doings. They, too, are caught in the web, the cycle of lies and deceit that comes with the mentality of extreme perfectionism.
But you know what? Once you realize you've been lied to that way, you can break that chain within yourself and say, "I do not have to be that way anymore. I do not have to compete with them for energy and attention."
How to break that chain, then?
Everyone's got their own methods, so I'm not going to say how you should do it. Besides, it's better if you come up with your own ways of breaking such cycles, because those ways would have *your* personal signature that you alone can resonate with. And even if you borrow ideas of coping and healing from other people, you still end up molding them to how *your* brain operates. But if you still think you have to follow those other people's ways to the letter, then you are completely missing the point.
I oughta know. I've been retraining my own mind to get out of those idiotic agreements I made with myself about all of what I just wrote: the perfectionism, the do-it-right-the-first-time attitude, that sort of thing.
Like I said in a previous post...this is all one Big Dream...and we all share it. I would think it's time to wake the heck up!
Blessings and Namaste,
Rev. Kat ^.^
