On Perfection
Forever approaching, Never arriving.
We live our lives chasing dreams—our bodies in the present, our minds lost in the future. There’s an innate restlessness within us—an inability to just be. Most of us are never quite satisfied, not with how we look, how we behave, or how we act. It’s as if we are constantly at odds with ourselves, frustrated for falling short, for not living up to some imagined ideal—some ever-elusive state of perfection.
And yet, this dissatisfaction is paradoxical.
It is both the driving force behind our growth and the greatest burden we carry. It never allows us to rest in our achievements, no matter how significant, yet it propels us forward, fueling our ambitions and pushing us, perhaps, toward an illusion of perfection.
But to what end? What is this elusive ideal we chase—so vast, so undefined—that it keeps contentment just out of reach?
Perhaps the real issue lies in our assumption that perfection exists.
We act as if there is some final state of flawlessness, a finish line where everything will fall into place. But perfection is an illusion—an ever-receding horizon, always just beyond reach. Just as an asymptotic curve approaches its line infinitely without ever touching it, our pursuit of perfection brings us ever closer—yet mathematically, fundamentally unable to reach it. No matter how much we strive, it remains just out of reach.
It happens because our notion of perfection itself is not static but always evolving. As we grow closer to our ideals, they too transform, revealing new horizons of possibility we couldn't previously envision.
Maybe the answer isn’t in breaking free from the pursuit, because striving is part of what makes us human. But we can change our relationship with it. Instead of seeing the gap as failure, perhaps we can embrace it as the space where life happens—not in reaching perfection, but in learning to live with its impossibility.
Perhaps there's freedom in acknowledging perfection's impossibility—not a surrender, but a liberation from the stress and the guilt of unreachable standards. This awareness allows us to honor the journey rather than fixate on an unreachable destination.
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