Is this right?
“Right now is the perfect time to do something imperfectly.”
The phrase stares neatly up at me from a glossy designer sticker at my local plant shop.
The feelings these words cast into my body are anything but neat. They flutter around in here (I hold a hand to my chest) with a wild excitement that could actually be panic—I can’t tell. There’s something about them that feels like a cliff’s edge: which could be thrilling, as long as I have on the right equipment. I can’t tell if I’m equipped.
The automatic Dyson hand dryer in the Starbucks bathroom is pasted across the front with instructions for employee hand washing. Not once, but twice, the steps for proper hand washing are pictured involving paper towels. There is not a paper towel in sight. I stand there for a moment with dripping hands (I’m not so broken that this paralyzes me) (yet). Thanks to the step-by-step, pictured sequence, I know what I should do. Given the provided equipment, I know what I will do. In this brief disembodied moment, the disconnect between these two looms large, a perfect metaphor for my life: The instructions for accomplishing the task are right there. They are very clear. They are very simple. Literally anyone could do this.
A question materializes in the air around me as I hold my hands under the hand dryer. Is this right? It seems to attach itself to everything for me these days (free of charge): Is this right? I travel around with a whole collection, as if gathering this query is a delightful hobby. It’s hard to shake it when the consequences of the question are so nebulous. Maybe it matters not at all. Maybe it matters the most. Roll the dice.
For the past couple of months, I have been dogged by that question, paired with this sinking feeling that everything is really not going to be alright, after all. There has been so much change in my world, and my inner self is way way behind in making adjustments to meet the new. I keep trying on different versions of reality, starting with the ones already in my closet. Does this still fit? Is this right? And then maybe that last one was right and I already rejected it. Start at the beginning again.
It doesn’t help that I’ve had very little practice in my life listening to, let alone trusting, my intuition. I don’t know the sound of her voice and, worse than that, I’ve learned over the course of my years to distrust her voice as that of something/someone/anything other than myself. No, not just any “something,” but specifically Evil, bent on tripping up my every step. That viewpoint certainly hasn’t imbued me with great confidence in my decision-making ability.
I desperately need that inner mooring of self confidence because change has shot my stability through with holes, and this sail won’t hold wind anymore. Any movement in any direction feels totally out of my control. I would like more power over my situation, please. Is that wrong? The narrative about control that I’m used to swimming in is that it is, in fact, wrong—wrong to want it; wrong to pursue it; wrong to wield it. Wanting and using it makes you a rigid, selfish, grasping, untrusting person. But when you are standing on a ledge and you want to live and there’s unsteady ground and a stiff breeze and a host of other elements pushing and pulling against you, control is necessary, right? You need to be able to rely on the grip of your feet and the inner muscle control over the balance of your form. You want there to be power in your arms and legs and control over your interaction with your environment. That can’t be wrong. That has to be…natural. Can one build confidence without control? Not over everything, but over some things.
I want to claim the holiness of control. Holiness, after all, is simply something dedicated to the divine. Something sacred, which is to say connected to God or dedicated to her. And control (would I lose all of your respect if I admitted that I am Googling definitions? Should I care? IS THAT RIGHT? ) is “the power to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events.” Even single-celled organisms control their movement—they don’t just float around waiting for something to make all their choices for them. Can’t that movement be dedicated to the divine as the worship of living actively in the forms we’ve been gifted (these minds, these bodies, this world)? Yet, fear stirred up by a host of unknowns has me tangled up inside, so tight I can’t move in this dense jungle of vast possibilities.
Oh, I want to cry for a whole afternoon. I want to scream. I want to violently push out of my body all the what ifs that are paralyzing me and slam the door shut on them. I want to be able to hear my own voice. To want something and know that I want it and then do it and then be O.K. with what was done. I want to think of the things that result from my choices as just chosen story lines. This one over that. Not “the right one” or “the wrong one.” I want to wield my own power like a machete—pick a direction and carve a path through the jungle one step at a time. I want to move my feet forward even knowing there’s so much I don’t know about what lies ahead.
I see now that I’m talking about reclaiming control and surrendering control in tandem. Isn’t that just like me. Maybe they aren’t so different, those two. Maybe there’s one coin and these are the two sides and they exist at the same time, flipping one to the other and back again in a sun-catching kind of way through the tumble of time. They are holy (wholly?) together.
Maybe that’s why that casually printed phrase grabbed me so violently at first sight that I would pay $4 to take it home. “Right now is the perfect time to do something imperfectly”—both are present at the same time here: movement and surrender. In short: Make a choice, and then live with it.
Here’s me, today, making a choice and living with it.
