Yes, I know it’s a perfectly good adverb–and if we were talking about grammar, we could call it a noun–but in keeping with the past 197 days, we are going to abuse “imperfect” into service as a verb….
As in: now is not the time for perfecting my practice of living simply (or anything else, for that matter).
I suppose I could have gone with “compromise” or “allow,” if they weren’t already claimed….
The house is close to being an empty shell. There are just a couple of pieces of furniture left to load into the pod (actually, it’s five, but who’s counting). The upstairs hallway is lined with boxes that are ready to move up to the new house, and we are still scheduled to have the pods drive off on Sunday.
And that’s where the imperfecting comes in.
I’ve hauled piles of cardboard away and searched out polystyrene recycling sites on a number of occasions over the past few months, but today, the trash collectors picked up all sorts of potentially recyclable and/or donation-worthy items and hauled them off to a landfill somewhere.
And I’ve shed t-shirts and suits by the bagful, and purged all sorts of “archival” items of doubtful interest–but now, I’m dumping stuff into boxes knowing that once they arrive at our new home in the mountains, we will need to filter through piles of paper and mountains of old shoes… or we will be right back into the clutter.
And perhaps this moment was inevitable, regardless of the circumstances, but certainly with a funeral in just a couple of days and my wife off with her mother, there really was little other choice I had.
The choice I do have, though is this: whether or not I should feel guilty for these last minute “lapses.” And I choose not to feel guilty… for today, at least.
So today I’m letting go of something I’ve often held onto too tightly: that desire for perfection, and that sense of disappointment when I inevitably fail to miss that mark.
I think it’s safe to say I can do without those feelings, if only for today.
365 Simplify 
I think it’s good that you let go, there really is no need for perfection at this point – you know where you want to be and you will get there eventually. I don’t think you’ll ever let the clutter back in again. So yes, imperfect all you need, there’s enough going on so you don’t have to do perfect right now.
It’s a weird kind of character defect isn’t it–that I have to “allow” myself to be imperfect. As though I ever had a chance of doing anything perfect in the first place. As an aside: at the funeral service today, the priest talked about being in “the mess of life.” I truly appreciated his words today!
I really really like this post. It’s a great message for everyone. I can relate to what you’re going through with “dumping”. It’s OK. In times like this it’s not easy to remember that simplicity is a process and it gets messy — often messier before it gets better. Your ability to be honest in the moment, express it beautifully and share it is a bundled gift. So… if “imperfect” is a verb, I’m imagining that the accent falls on the last syllable, as in, “I’m going to imperfect my day.” Strangely, that feels like an affirmation. 🙂
Thanks, Julie–I do need to make this my “daily affirmation” these days!
Life is messy sometimes.
Ooh–you have to read my response to Theresea above!
What Julie said!
Agree, what Julie said!
“I’m going to imperfect my day”, I like that 🙂