Day 22: No One is Perfect

So today I was having a conversation with a friend and it took a philosophical turn. They mentioned something that they heard earlier that day and it rang true with something that I firmly believe. It's not really widely accepted in my experience, so it's always fun for me to find someone else that truly agrees with me on this. To clarify, it IS widely "accepted" but not many people act on that accepting. I'll go ahead and say to help that sentence make more sense. No one is perfect. Absolutely no one (that's still living in human form at least). You'll find people all the time that say that and agree immediately when you tell them this, but very rarely will you find someone who actually applies this to their life.

I have spent a lot of time considering this, so I'm going to go ahead and lay out what I have put together in my mind (feel free to add to these statements or apply your own spin in the comments, this is a topic I love to discuss). First of all, each of us knows better than anyone else how imperfect we as our own individuals are. That is to say that I know how screwed up I am better than anyone else does (or can). However, many of us fail to realize that this actually as much of a sign of being human as opposable thumbs are. All humans have opposable thumbs: no matter the skin tone, hair color, eye color, height, weight, number of freckles, or any other characteristic that they may have. In the same way, we all have Imperfection. I capitalize that because I'm not talking about physical imperfections (although that is true for 99.9999 percent of the population apart from you Grant Gustin, you beautiful man). So if we know for a fact that we ourselves are imperfect, how can we expect another human to be so? No one can be something that someone else cannot. We all have the same potential but it will always be short of perfection. 

To prove my point that most people expect others to be perfect, I would argue that this exact belief is the root of many arguments or frustrations. We like to think of celebrities as "perfect" so it always causes a big fuss when one of them does something human or imperfect. We expect our family members to be perfect so we get mad when someone shows up to a family reunion three days late (or God forbid misses it entirely). We expect the President to be perfect so when he messes up the opposite party likes to jump on his back and try to prove that they would've done it better. These are just a few examples but every day we expect other people to be perfect. 

When I first accepted the fact that no one is perfect and stopped trying to pretend that other people actually could be, my life got so much easier. When someone screwed up, I no longer had to deal with the problem created on top of my let down expectations. I could focus on fixing things and moving forward instead of crying over spilled milk because someone let me down. Because that's just a fact of life; people will let you down. Get over it. And keep moving forward.