Made for perfection

Every human person, Dr. Jose R. Gullas believes, is born perfect. His basis for believing so is the biblical precept that each man or woman is an exact copy of the image of his or her Creator. And since God is the ultimate measure of perfection, it follows that all those He creates in His image are imbued with His perfect qualities.

Dr. Gullas is a very optimistic person. His words always carry with them encouragement and hope. But I also know him to be highly practical and down-to-earth. And so I don’t take literally his position on man’s innate perfection.

Perfection is a general challenge we all grow up with. Our society regards highly those who appear to be perfect, and holds them up as models for all others to emulate. To be a small bit less of perfection is construed as failure.

Consider how many parents scold their kids for being just one item less of a perfect score in a school test. As they say, if you take a single centavo from a peso, it’s not a peso anymore but just a few centavos.

Perfection is crucial in some areas of life. It is necessary in building a spaceship, conducting a heart transplant, and similar extremely delicate undertakings. But in those areas, we give this supreme quality another, more apt name — precision. We just know that we shouldn’t call any slight semblance of perfection as perfection itself. Just like we don’t call tiny fragments of a cake as cakes, but crumbs.

The vast majority of the things we do in life does not necessarily require perfection or its close relative, precision. In fact, an obsessive striving to attain perfection can be self-defeating. It is a delusion to aspire for something unattainable.

Many people ruin themselves with their obssession for perfection. More than they are aware of or are willing to admit, they are hindered by their desire to be perfect. They cow out at the possibility of making a mistake. So they refrain from doing anything; you could not make a mistake by doing nothing. In the end, they achieve far too little where they wanted to achieve the most.

Likewise, someone who will not tolerate mistakes is afraid to delegate. In the process, he tires himself unnecessarily by taking all the tasks. And the very perfection he wanted to ensure by doing things all by himself may elude him.

The life of a perfectionist is not a happy one, because it is aimed at accomplishing the impossible dream. More often than not, the perfectionist is at odds with himself because he cannot live up to his own expectations. His relationship with others lack solid grounding. By being compulsively perfectionist about his car, his house, his desk, his clothes, his children, his spouse, his colleagues—he not only needlessly wastes time and energy but, more sadly, alienates himself from everyone.

Misplaced perfectionism may even be a sign of a faulty sense of judgment or lack of balance. It is no better than paranoia or any other psychological disorders, those irrational attitudes or reactions to the world. And, as in any illness or disorder, prevention is always better than cure.

It is good to, once in a while, check on one’s own standards and objectives in whatever he does – whether he is more interested in doing things right than in doing the right things, the latter being the more sensible attitude. As an anonymous quote puts it: “A flawed diamond is more valuable than a perfect brick.”

A perfectionist often lacks a sense of priority and is liable to get easily preoccupied with anything that crops up at the moment. The immediacy of present concerns tends to make him nearsighted and instantly magnify matters in his mind. But most things only seem more important in the present than they really are.

It helps to back off a little and view things in the perspective of a lifetime. After a while, the same things that originally appeared pressing are likely to become far less compulsive. Remember your first love. Didn’t you, at the time, feel like you’d die if the other person left you? The great majority of us don’t die after our first loves. Instead, we usually end up happier with someone else.

Perfection is an ideal that should incessantly encourage us to try to be better. But, at the same time, we should know that we could never make it an actual goal in this world. We might have been perfect at birth. Yet the moment we began to assimilate into this world of temptations and sin, we’d been rendered corruptible.

We are perfect in the sense that we came from a perfect Source. But we have been corrupted and demeaned in the course of our worldly pursuits. Yet, still, we must not lose hope of regaining our original state of grace.

This, to my understanding, is what Dr. Gullas believes. A state of perfection that has become buried in our worldly selves. A divine light that awaits to be brought back to the surface, to shine again.

There is always hope for us to be whole again. We are made for perfection. No matter how broken any one of us might have become, he or she can always return to being God’s perfect creation.

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