Gordian Knot
Sean Moore
I was spending some time with a good friend of mine not too long ago. A perfectionist, you’d call her. The kind that will stay awake until three in the morning making sure a layout is pixel-perfect. The kind that corrects the grammar, spelling, and punctuation of any and all of your text messages, in the kindest, most honest, and definitely not annoying kind of way.
Yeah, that kind of perfectionist.
She was showing off her new hobby, a hobby her friend had taught her recently. Knitting, she called it; though it appeared, to the untrained eye, to be more like knotting yarn together, looking over it with a fine-toothed comb, and then hastily undoing the last ten minutes of needlework. Over the course of our time together, what had started as a two-inch prelude to a beautifully knit scarf, ended… as roughly a two-inch prelude to a scarf.
Knit and unknit. Knit and unknit.
I almost felt bad, being there as a distraction from her work. We’d get to talking for a while, her hands would keep moving, needles following that rhythmic pattern. Under, over. Under, over. In no time, there was quite a length.
But in that length was something insidious. Once or twice – and mind you, none of this was apparent to the untrained eye – was a stitch ever so slightly out of place. And so my friend would make all this progress, all the while unknowingly sowing the seeds of her failure. Inevitably, our conversation would pause and she would look down and see her mistakes. And every stitch would be undone, to start again anew.
There’s a problem, you see. Perfectionists see every flaw.
I’m not much of a knitter, mind you. But I too, am a perfectionist. For six months that meticulous, nervous energy went into making this site Just Right. Perfecting the layout. Setting up the sections, the about pages, the extraneous material just so. Changing a hue here, the saturation there, adjusting brightness ever so slightly. This font doesn’t look great, or that heading doesn’t work well.
And the writing itself – what a deliberation! Writing in just the right voice. Working as hard as I could to avoid the first person (and the parenthetical, too – look how that turned out).
Perfection can consume you. Perfection consumed me, for the past six months. In all that time, the one thing I didn’t do was the one thing, the only thing, this site even existed for: to write. Instead of enabling me to write every day, all this overhead made me avoid the one thing I really wanted to do.
“This is supposed to be relaxing.”
That was her answer to my question of why she started knitting in the first place. There was more than a little bit of humor in response. Because she knew, and I could clearly see, that the one thing she could not possibly have done with that ball of yarn and needles was relax. It wasn’t enough for her to just be something she did with her hands to unwind. It had to be perfect.
I tried to convince her that the only way to knit that perfect scarf was to make some mistakes. She agreed completely.
And then proceeded to undo her work for the fourth time that night.
We wish we can be perfect the first time. Especially in this age of having the best of anything, everything, and everyone, screenfuls at a time. But we have to accept that perfection needs practice. The work you do now is down payment for future perfection. Blemishes, mistakes – or uneven stitching and incorrect font sizes, as the case may be – are a necessary part of the process in becoming great.
It’s hard to accept that blemishes will happen. That they’re necessary, even. Learning occurs through making and correcting mistakes. The trouble is, where do these mistakes go to, now?
With the internet, that’s a tougher question. Not too long ago, when a writer wanted to make a name for him or herself, there were layers to hide the stories, the articles, the novels, that didnt make the cut. Publishers provided the bar: you must be this good to be viewable by the public.
But this is the Internet. Always available, always viewable. Where do mistakes go here? In the archives, for someone to come across some indeterminate point in the future.
I’m a self-conscious guy. The thought of this trailing anchor of sub-par work horrified me.
Maybe the only way to win is not to play.
Later, she put her needles away. And for the first time she relaxed. No further on her project then when she started, really. I think by then that we both had realized that this spinning of the wheels was no good to anyone. All that effort, just to end with nothing to show for it.
Nothing finished. Nothing shipped.
And as I left, she told me that maybe this time next year, she’d actually have something, anything, to show for her work. At first, I thought she was being facetious, given what I had seen her accomplish that night.
Later though, I realized, that she said it in earnest. It was a promise to me, and more importantly, herself, that she wouldn’t let her strange “tick” of needing everything to look exactly right to get in the way of making something beautiful.
All this was a very long-winded welcome to my brand new site, Belligerent Mars. I’ve set down my needles so to speak, and stepped away from my creation, blemishes and all, and recognize that no matter how much I wish it were otherwise, success and failure are on a continuum. And we have to start somewhere.
This is that start.