CALL IT GOOD
A lot of us strive for perfect. Plenty of our jobs, systems, purchases, and relationships, even, are about making our lives more perfect. And if you’re like me, you often believe that on the other side of this perfection lies what you’ve been searching for beneath it all: peace, happiness, a sense of “this is all right”. But, if you’re like me, you know how impossible it is to get to the island perfection with amenities such as our deep contentment and bottomless margaritas. It’s within sight, or at least imagination, but always out of reach. Sometimes it feels painfully far, and other times it feels excruciatingly close. The Buddha called suffering “the space between reality as it is and reality as we think it should be.” At all times, I’m doing the calculus about how much space is between my life as it is and my life as I think it should be, and rent my soul pays is way too expensive in a place like that.
That’s not the only problem. For all my desire about leading a perfect life, I’m letting the one around me pass by without really spending much time in it. My mind is constantly on where it should be, my career, my bank account, my romantic life, and then the subsequent steps to get it to that place. Then I go to bed. And then my alarm clock goes off and I’m not ok with any of it, again. It’s time to steer the boat towards perfect and keep rowing. And then we go to sleep. And then we wake up. And then we go to sleep. And then we wake up. And then we go to sleep. And then….
Some of you may be familiar with the creation narrative from the Bible, a powerful story that seeks to answer the “why” of the universe. In the story, the creator, Yahweh, is speaking things into existence, calling things into being. The story is segmented up into seven days, and each day Yahweh brings something new to the world, gives it a name, and a place to live. One day it’s light, separated from darkness. Another day it’s the skies. Another day it’s the land, separated from the waters. Then sky creatures and water creatures. Then land creatures. Then, finally, humans.
I grew up in a family where this story was talked about often, and even so, as tends to happen with writing like this, I was struck with something new from it recently. New to me, anyway. As Yahweh is making making making, speaking speaking speaking, every once in a while, usually at the end of one of the days, the story will stop. And before the day closes, the story says this phrase: “And Yahweh saw that it was good.”
Good.
Not perfect. Not flawless. Not faultless. Good.
Sit with me here: the ultimate creator of everything, the One capable of asking the lights to turn on for the first time, telling the ocean where to stop, setting everything around us into its first motion, all of it, that One is looking at what’s been made and thinks it’s good.
When I call something “good”, it usually means “but there’s room for improvement.” When someone calls my work good, it means “why wasn’t it exemplar.” I never hear or say “that was good” and get a deep sense of satisfaction. But somehow, even though it was probably more perfect than anything I’ve ever made, Yahweh looks at creation and says “yeah, this is good,” and is satisfied with that. If anyone could call anything perfect, ever, it was Yahweh, then. But for Yahweh, “good” work was the truth of it. The flawlessness of the work wasn’t what mattered, its goodness was.
There’s nothing about my life that is perfect, but there is so much about my life that is good. And in my relentless pursuit of perfection, I miss all of that good sitting right in front of me. I don’t enjoy my work, because it’s not perfect. Neither is my apartment, my relationships. But when I look at my life, the whole of it, and lay down my question “is it perfect?” and instead pick the question “is it good?”, it’s like a wall comes down, the hot blizzard stops. My soul catches its breath. Tears of gratitude begin to come out of hiding. My whole body joins in response.
And when this happens, the imperfect and good things I’ve been neglecting around me start to find new meaning and purpose in my life. I don’t feel the need to careen forward towards the mirage of perfection in front of me, because I am already in a place of good. The effort in my life becomes for its own sake because the effort is good for me, but it doesn’t have to be a pursuit of perfection anymore. No one says at the funeral of another, “this person lived a perfect life”, but they say “this person lived a good life.” And so many of us will miss living a good life because we thought it was our job to live a perfect life.
Hear this: this is not an essay about lowering your standards, it’s an essay about changing what your standards look at entirely. “Good” is not a step down from “perfect”, it’s on a totally different rubric. It’s not that Yahweh looks at his creation and calls it something less than it really is. Yahweh looks at his creation, and “perfect” isn’t even what matters. Creation’s goodness, that’s what matters. This point is key, and I’m still finding words for it, but “perfect” and “good” aren’t two different points on the same spectrum. One is math, the other is poetry. One is calories, the other is flavor. One is a diagram, the other is a painting. One is decibles, the other is melody.
I’ve probably said this in every other essay I’ve published, but my favorite fiction book ever is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck (I’m about to talk about the end so skip this paragraph if you don’t want a quote spoiled— no notes about the plot though). Near the end, there’s a conversation between a young character and an older character who has been speaking truth to the younger one for a long time. The younger character has spent so much of his life trying to please his dad and being afraid that his life is doomed with evil. So much of his life is focused on not being a screw-up, not being a source of pain for others, and not failing. But after a crisis moment happens in his life, he’s faced with the need to reevaluate everything about his paradigm. He realizes that his life was never about not messing up, and that who he was becoming in the circumstance of his life was up to him. In this moment, the older character confronts him and delivers this truth that ran over my thirsty soul like water: “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can finally be good.”
Do me a favor. Take two minutes after reading this. Let the world spin. Look at your life, feel the breath moving in and out of your lungs. Feel your feet on the ground, or your butt in your seat. And remember that perfect was not the goal of this life, good was. Let the good of your life speak to you. Join with the Creator, the One who looked at it all after it was finished and said, “wow, it is good.” And hear your body respond, “yeah, it is.”