Atonement musings

Since Elul began last month, I've purposely been doing a lot of introspection and, in many ways, have found myself changing - ever so subtly and slightly, but changing nonetheless. It's not so much that I'm learning new things: the positive things I need to implement in my life and the negative things I need to omit from my life, are things which I have always known and things I knew I needed to do. Call it laziness/procrastination/downright complacency, I've just never done what I needed to do. But Elul came about, and, with it, came a forceful push to look at myself properly, and, more than that, get the ball rolling on changing. With the introspection came, for the first time in my life, a hand-in-hand approach to change. I married the two together in my head, and, so, couldn't do one without the other. It was a conscious decision to do this - and while the journey of introspection will never be over, my current push for introspection/self-evaluation/change was all geared towards the coming of this awe-inspiring Day of Atonement which begins in a mere few hours.

Yom Kippur: the final realization of these past six weeks.

I've been thinking alot about perfection in general and I posted a blog about this elusive state of perfection a few weeks ago. Perfection, to me, is a very relative and personal thing. What can be considered to be perfection by one, is perhaps  utter imperfection to another. We all have different standards, different goals, different outlooks, different purposes, different abilities, different talents, different experiences, different personalities, and, as such, we all have differing views on what perfection entails. A six year old child draws a picture of a horse and, to her, that is perfection. Leonardo da Vinci paints a painting of a mysterious woman, and to him (and many in the world) that is the (or, one) overarching standard of perfection. Much as personalities, values and goals change with time, so too does personal measures of perfection. The six year old child who drew that picture of a horse may look back when she is ten and be astounded that she ever thought that was the highest she could achieve. Perfection (or, let's use the word contentment, but to me, they are interchangable as they are both desired states where we wish do to be, but oftentimes, are not) is a clean, orderly, yet cluttered room and rainy weather - whereas to someone else, it would be sunny weather and a minimalist decor. Perfection depends on the person. Happiness depends on the individual. I'm not sure if there is an overriding Standard of Perfection somewhere out there in the universe, but somehow I don't think there is. I think life is simply too varied for there to be a particular, generic standard. Life isn't the ISO; it is not always ordered like a stately British manor. Life is chaotic and unpredictable; life abounds with differences and uniqueness. This is what makes Life beautiful: that in it's chaotic and many varied differences, life doesn't present us with only one type of perfection, because Life has seen to it that we are all different.

Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder.

In many ways, Judaism as a spiritual pathway agrees with me on this point. We are not given a model of someone to emulate and follow. There is no WWJD equivalent in Judaism; there is no hadith to tell us which side of the bed we should sleep on or how many women we can marry because our chief prophet did so. Instead, the Tanakh captures the stories of very many individuals, each of whom went through very different, very unqiue experiences; each of whom were faced with different goals to accomplish, different hurdles to cross; each of whom whose stories captured their imperfections and failures, but, in so doing, highlighted their greatness precisely because of their ever-steady quest to achieve their missions. There was never One Prophet in Judaism - there were Prophets and great people; each of whom had a unique story and a unique purpose to fulfill. Ask a roomful of Jews who the most important prophet in Judaic history was and you'd be greeted a compendium of answers: Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Deborah, Herzl. We were not given one man/woman to look up to - we were given many. Many men and many women, whose greatness was in their journeys, whose greatness was in their attempts to achieve their missions/unique perfections, whose greatness was in their constant determination to try, to try and to try again.  This is what makes Moses, Ruth, David, Abraham, Daniel, Esther and all the rest great. This is what made them worthy of being remembered. They didn't try to emulate anyone else; they were ever faithful to charting their own course/story and trying to achieve their personal best/perfection. This is what we must emulate: we must find our own unique destinies, our own unique missions and try to fulfill it using our unique abilities, skills and talents. God did not intend for me to emulate anyone else, because He made me who I uniquely am, just as much as he didn't intend for you to be Sarah or Joshua. If He had wanted us to emulate any of the great prophets or sages or great people who populate the wide scope of Jewish history, well, He would have made us exactly like them, in exactly their time, with exactly their life circumstances, and exactly their genetic make-up.

I am who I am. You are who you are.

Find your unique perfection and strive to embrace it, while being inspired by others, but not trying to be them.

Yom Kippur, to me, is more than just my atonement of my past transgressions. It's the culmination of an annual journey - a day to do more than beg forgiveness. It's about realizing that mistakes made in the past are just that, past. Judaism is a verb - it is a religion of doing more than it is a religion of faith. It is easy to have faith, easy to believe, easy to know what's wrong and right - but it is much more difficult to do, to act. Forgiveness is not just in saying sorry, it's about doing sorry - showing that one has realized the mistakes of the past and will actively not seek to repeat them in the future. Yom Kippur is the final day of a six-week journey that we are blessed with each year to look closely at ourselves and to evaluate where we are and where we want to be. It's the time when we pick up that puerile picture of the horse we drew this past year and realize that we can do even better, and, thus, set an even higher level of perfection for ourselves.

Perfection

Attempting perfection is worth more than achieving perfection. It's the effort that counts.

(A personal pep-talk for myself)

In my life I've found that I've always had this odd preoccupation with "perfection". Not in the conventional sense of perfection in everything I do (because truth be told, I'm oddly attracted to flaws), but rather perfection in the direction I want my life to take. I guess "perfection" is not the right word to describe what I'm looking for - maybe I'm not that good at writing as I think I am. How can I explain it properly? When I was younger, I'd chart out my week by breaking it down into little bits and pieces and have a rating system down next to each bit and piece. Then, I'd cumulatively sum the score and  and rate the day as a whole based on the scores for each bit and piece: was it an amazing day?, an ok day?, a day which fell below my projections? I actually felt fulfilled in making these timetables, and a lot more satisfaction in checking it off at the end of the day. I still make these sort of lists in my 20's, primarily concerned with those areas of my life that need structuring: my writing, my studying, my Hebrew, my Jewish studies, my eating, my exercising, my smoking; but it was in those early years that my list-making compulsion bordered on the somewhat... obsessive.

It's not the list-making that I want to write about tonight: it's this penchant for wanting to compartmentalise all the various aspects and areas of my life, and, thus be able to ascertain whether or not I'm succeeding in where I want to be in life, where I want to go. It's a sort of control mechanism, and over the years I've come to realise that in trying to structure things - while it does bring me a great amount of satisfactory joy - I'm never exactly able to reach the lofty, albeit daily, goals I set for myself.

I'm not an unhappy person in the micro-sense of the word. But when I step out of myself and look at everything from the point of view of the big picture, it can and does make me worried and somewhat... afraid, simply because I hardly ever achieve what I want to achieve. It's a matter of discipline, of inspiration, of dedication, of motivation, of focus - and the sad thing is, it's so easy for me to lose all of these sources. I'm so easily distracted. So were I as fastidious as I used to be in my childhood, I'd probably be rating each day as highly unfulfilled. It's a sad truth, but it's a truth - one I must come to terms with and accept, and even more importantly, try to change.

I have to understand that if I falter in one minute, it doesn't matter. The upcoming minute is a fresh new start. There is no need to throw the towel in on everything if one tiny bit is compromised. Just dust yourself off, Nick, and try again. When I look back on all my days, as separate composites within a greater whole, I realise that the days where I at least try, are the days where I can, in hindsight, feel proud.

Take writing for instance. I've divided this wide area into four distinct groupings: working on my book, blogging, writing in my diary, and writing articles. In the past 48 hours, I've managed to do three out of the four. Awesome check next to those three, resulting in a cumulative score of awesome, resulting in a very happy Nick.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this particular blog is: is it about my quest for daily and overall "perfection" (for want of a much better word), or is it about my weird compulsive trait of listing and comparing and determining results? Perhaps it's a bit of both. I'm probably always going to be making lists and resolving to be better in the next minute/hour/day/week/month, and I'm probably always going to falter in achieving these goals I set, but I've got to try. My parents are both quite organised people, and I suppose this desire to structure my life is a genetic boon (or flaw, depending upon how you look at it), but the attempt to accomplish my targets is a struggle I'm going to have to embrace. It's the attempt that counts, right? 

In the past few days, in re-reading the current manuscript I'm working on, I'm finding the writing not as up to par as I thought it was ten months ago. Have I grown in that time? Have I progressed as a writer such that I'm no longer satisfied with what was considered "perfection" back then? I know that in writing, it makes no sense to continuously and endlessly edit, because I'm always going to find errors and find things I want to change, link, develop, omit, add. I know there will come a time when I'll have to say "Ok! This is it! Time to get a move on with literary agents, etc.", but I don't think this is what's going on right now. I've ignored my manuscript for the past few months - perhaps on purpose, but I'm not ashamed to throw in the possibility that it was sheer lack of motivation which led to the aforementioned abandonment - and this current re-reading isn't leaving me a very happy camper. True, yesterday wasn't a very good day for me, as my sleep cycle had been wack (as usual; this is another area of my life which is in desperate - extremely desperate! - need of fixing), so maybe that's why I thought my writing wasn't very good, but I'm also reading V.S Naipaul's Among the believers and I can compare the two styles, and, truth be told, my writing isn't even near his level. And the thing is, and I'm not being egotistical here, I know I have the talent and ability to write with comparable flair. Yes, there were bits of my manuscript which still stood out as "perfection" but so many others are leaving the "imperfect" aftertaste in my mouth... I don't think I'm being too harsh.

Writing is an art form, it's a skill, and like any creative subject, it needs practice to be properly honed and perfected. The writer of today is going to be a vastly different writer in a year, or two, and even more vastly different in a decade. Creativity is never going to be the same, and the artist will forever be growing and moving upwards.

I admit, in my weird quest for perfection, in the past few hours, I've thought about abandoning my manuscript and starting on something else. But that's what I've done all my life. When "perfection" hasn't been achieved, I give up and let go and wait for another time to try again. I can't do that now, can I? I've nursed this story for so long (granted, I haven't really put enough time into it, and, in hindsight, I haven't truly dug deep and can go a whole lot deeper), so why do that? It's time to just do it. Just do it, Nick. Just stop being lazy, just find the motivation, just dig deep and do it.

Attempt.

Then, when I look back next week, I can feel fulfilled; even if I didn't exactly reach my targeted mark for the week, I can, at least, have that feeling of satisfaction of knowing: at least you attempted.

And who knows, maybe I might succeed.

So the goals will be set (as per usual), but I'm going to make the effort after setting the goals - I'm going to try.