“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.”

– Eugene Delacroix

As I often tell people, I just love paradoxes.  One of my favorites is the paradox of being perfect.  Although I would like to be perfectly me, I seriously doubt that anyone looking from the outside in would label that as perfection.  To be perfectly ourselves includes a lot of imperfection!  As human beings, we live in a world that requires ingenuity.  Anyone who ever has studied high school Physics can tell you that perfection is not attainable in a world where friction messes with your Math and experiments never turn out exactly the way you think they should.

I always have loved Math.  It is so neat and so tidy and so perfectly exact in its answers.  Even the longest equation ultimately is solved, and it leaves us with an answer we can take to the bank.  Perfection.  I loved the feeling of wrapping it in a neat package and tying it up with a bow.  Math is like that.

My life, on the other hand, is a Physics experiment.  I may think my perfect Math will see me through; but the truth is that I seem to collide with a whole lot of other equations that run perpendicular to my path to solution, that bounce off its boundaries, that mix in numbers that might not belong, so that I am left untangling them and trying to find my bearings after being knocked off course.

Often, I think, we become so enamored of the Mathematical approach to life and its neat, tidy answers, that we lose sight of the fact that we are called to be Physicists.  We live in a world of twists and turns and excitement.  To be a perfect physicist, I must be ready to factor in all the forces that impact my theoretical straight line and still find my way to its end.  A need for perfection can put us in blinders.  We shoot at great speed down the tunnel we use to define our path from beginning to end, never feeling the impact of other forces.  We miss the sorrow of others, the pain of relationships, the sadness of loss, the bitterness of our human condition.  We also miss the love, the tenderness, the joy, the adventure of simply being alive in the midst of the world of physics.

I try to imagine a world where all the equations are the same and they all run parallel — where each individual achieves the same sort of perfection as every other person, but sadly never touches the joy of companionship along the way.  I think that the world of parallel perfection would be quite lonely and maybe even boring.  Let’s jump into the tangle of real-world life, and enjoy the imperfection of being perfect physicists.  Let’s bask in the freedom of being human and achieve our best without worrying about being perfect.