A few years back, preparing to move cross-country and hoping to reduce the amount of stuff going with me, I held a yard sale.

One of the things I offered was a small, hand-created, wooden folk-art pig. (Doesn't everyone have one of these?)

The little guy had never been perfect; being handmade, he had peculiarities. Also somewhere in my ownership, he had fallen in an earthquake and gotten a crack over one ear.

No one bought him.

Which wasn't a big surprise.

After all, he was flawed.

Humans are not impressed with flaws. We don’t like them in others. We despise them in ourselves.

Even though this, Flawed is bad point of view has made so many lives a full-on misery of self-dissatisfaction.

I mean, look at you for example, sitting there all cracked and weird.

Look at that quick anger, those unloving judgments, the depressions, the secret shames. (What, you thought you were the only one?) Watch you yell at the kids, make mistakes, or freeze in order to not make any. Watch you eat too much, drink too much, avoid too much, be lazy too much.

Anxious, disapproving, unproductive, addicted, guilty, regretful, you.

​Which, when you think about it, might actually be kind of funny. Because what is a “flaw” anyway? What determines that it's a flaw?

After all, does perfection exist in any living thing? Anywhere?

Does a lawn full of grass blades not include brown spots, curled edges, holes and bumps?

Where was it decided that brown spots equal imperfect?

Maybe our certainty that we know what imperfection is, is confused.

Because you know what grass would be without all those "flaws?"

Astro-turf.

So-called defects are what separate life from plastic.

Life, in every form, comes with irregularities, blemishes and shortcomings.

Existence celebrates those irregularities.

Requires them actually.

How do we know flaws are required? Because imperfections are the only option. Nothing else exists.

Nature creates all these infinite configurations and varieties of experience, and then humans, with our delightful humility, come along and say, “No no no! That’s broken and bad!”

And we get to fixing, smoothing, therapizing, inquiring and satsanging.

Seems this wacky human species only wants sameness and duplication.

As if Barbie is somehow better than a real girl.

As if sameness is ideal rather than dull, tedious, monotonous.

So for a bit of new fresh thinking, we might start with checking whether what we think of as flaws, are actually flaws.

Y'know, as opposed to treasures.

We might consider whether our unwanted reactions and despised peculiarities actually need standardizing,

or whether they offer a unique, valued and valuable contribution to the consciousness experience.

Distinguishing us from lifeless, duplicatable, always identical, plastic.

It could be that our ADHD, or discomfort in social situations, or recurrent worrying, or kooky sexual preference, might be something to be esteemed instead of hidden, appreciated instead of fixed and whitewashed.

We may have had it wrong all this time.

It may be worth considering the usually rejected possibility that…

There’s nothing wrong with us.

And that not matching the ideal is the ideal.

Alive, odd, wrong, unfixed, us.

Like an artful little cracked pig…

Beautiful and interesting

with its flaws.

Because of its flaws.

Perfect.

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