On Perfection

I'm sure this is why many of them have been committed and/or all too soon interred, but the prospect of following in their footsteps in this regard didn't offset [much] the gratitude I felt for their early a.m. company. You see, while going through my morning motions, it was as if I were slipping down the receiving line of a dead writer's conference in the caverns of my subconscious.

Hemingway was first, and well of course he was, offering up the following:

"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts." -Death in the Afternoon

It's a book about bullfighting, of all the orphaned and wandering thoughts upstairs to beg at the skirts of my consideration today, and so early besides. I just suddenly woke up after having slept a little and there it was, this random quote, abrupt and plain. My body was still asleep, however, so I pondered more out of resort than intent if I were that applying critic and have been all this time. Could it really be that easy? Just a matter of cutting myself some slack? And then it seemed I understood. All things have at least some value, if only to remind us we're human, so I need not have regrets for my last few months "off the path", nor do I need to whip myself until I get back on it. The rationale is simple, I'll have and be what I most desire when I start accepting what it is I truly most desire.

You see, for the last several months I've been striving for purity and perfection in my own bastardized repetition of old habits long since thought exorcised. What was once an ideal weight is now an ideal diet, once an ideal career and family, now an idea skill and level of athletic performance. Why do I need so many absolutes and all or nothings, especially when I know it's but the simple pursuit of them that yields the guarantee of none. Ah, and there. It was this exactly that Hemingway was trying to tell me.

While swelling with that realization, ironically the sabotaging office scribe of my own self-doubt came tinkling down the hall of the conference, only to be stopped suck-breathed by his own intimidation before DH Lawrence, who apparently overheard things between Hemingway and me:

"For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are."

What this means is I should take a leap of faith and stop fighting against my natural tendencies despite how wrong or soft or ridiculous I think they are. I should instead try to work with them. The less I think and the more I accept, the farther I'll go and the happier I'll be. I will succeed organically, because this is what's in me.

That said, perhaps some of you are right. Perhaps for us everyday athletes there really is no such thing as balance, and thus the constant and ever evasive pursuit of it. After all if there were such a thing, as a continent is found in a body of water, surely I'd have sailed upon it by now, or at the very least would have heard of someone else who had. Yet here I am, still afloat on the same choppy sea.

Seems here's where I start entertaining the idea there really is only doing the best I can each day, and that as a result, some days will seem more accomplished than others. By the end of them it also seems logical if I've lived each and every one true to myself like this, my life will come out complete.

Perhaps DH Lawrence was right. I know if I ask myself what I truly want for my life it's to know I've lived, that I've enjoyed indulgences that much more because of periods of not, and that my exhilaration for epic victories has been heightened as a result of knowing so many stripped to soul defeats. I want to know I’ve learned and grown and have left a bit of all of it behind for those who would be so ambitious as to follow in my footsteps.

If I could someday say this of my often flawed and ever evolving life, well, I suppose that would be... perfect.