Progress And Perfection

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Before smart phones and tablets children use to play with plastic puzzles. You would have a grid of about sixteen tiles. One of these tiles would be missing and they would be jumbled up. The aim of the game was to shuffle the tiles around to make a picture or a sequence of numbers. The funny thing about this game however, was that even when you did the task well you were still left with an incomplete picture: you could make progress but never achieve perfection.

The desire to make progress is one thing. The desire to achieve perfection is something else. Progress is more important than perfection. Sometimes, in order to make progress, we have to move things around. Sometimes we have to push things into place and simply accept that other things will, as a result, be shifted out of place. Like the puzzle game we played as children, life will never be perfect. There will always be pieces missing, but we can still strive to enjoy the process of making progress. We can still strive for perfection knowing that the best visions in life offer us something that, for all practical purposes, we will never actually reach, but for which we would gladly die trying. In attempting to create our own personal masterpieces we can still find meaning in that which is missing by accepting and understanding the fact that the pieces which are missing were never meant for us and those which were will find its place, in time.