As a coach – back track – as someone who creates and cares for a living, I often stumble abound the themes of perfectionism. I have had my own processes around this. It continues to evolve. In fact, I would say, this ‘blog’ is another attempt to reveal myself to the themes of perfectionism, to spirits that ask me for more, more – better, better. I could have a more intellectual, perhaps, psychoanalytical take on it – about my relationship to the Other. Instead, I have stubbed my foot on something that resonated with my heart unexpectedly. That is, the difference between ‘excellence’ and ‘perfect’.
I was watching a hand full of videos on Japanese craftworkers – mostly people who make furniture or work with textile. Occasionally I would go down the rabbit hole of listening to farmers. And I noticed something … in the Japanese language the implications behind the word ‘perfect’ was far less weighted than what I had come to know it in English. There is of course, the take that ‘perfectionism’ is a value of ‘white supremacy culture’ – so I had to look into this. I had to think for myself, where I had picked this specific weight of ‘perfection’ which I have learned to reference as ‘perfectionism’, when I somehow become paralyzed by the expectations of ‘it’ – where I have to come to punish myself for not being perfect. I think that’s the main difference.
In the Japanese language, as far as I grew up engaging with it as a Nikkei-jin (a foreign born Japanese person) – is that perfect, or 完璧 (kan-peki) – meant more … ‘excellence’, it meant more ‘completion’, there is not the kind of direct translation for me. It does not feel the same, when I say – 完璧 – vs, perfect. And that is the power of language, it is crafted by the cultural context, by the Other.
We inherit and internalize it. So, we are invited to examine it – the pillars that frame the words we embody and are guided by.
I can’t tell you where exactly I got this idea from, but somewhere in my research of Japanese craft philosophy, I came across the difference of perfect vs excellence. In Japan, we don’t strive for perfect, as in … flawless, we in fact have several philosophies on the importance and embracing of ‘flaw’; wabi-sabi, kin-tsugi, being even popular in the West. Instead, it feels that we strive for ‘excellence’ which is the devotion to the craft over long lengths of time, of ‘mastery’ … of deep intimate relationship to the craft. It is an embrace that the work IS in fact, never finished. The next ‘go’ will always teach us something new. It is hard for me describe in one or two words, again, because there is no direct translation. For me, you have to watch and listen to the ways they work.
It is in the most honest way I can resonate with – a practice.
For them, perfection IS the practice – not the outcome.
And I am have been sitting with this and finding my own ways to integrate it. How do I let go of the Western semantics, or rather embrace that of my ancestors? To, greet then .. perfectionism, not as a ‘flaw’, but as the practice – to engage with my desire for ‘better’, not as something ‘scary’, but as the motivation, as the handshake which I enter the work through.
More on this as it develops.