IMPERFECTosphere

It's not about finding relevance or perfection or imperfection in objects, but it's that you can accept yourself and then go out and accept others.
~Jeff Koons

Here are some of the places you can find posts about IMPERFECT:

500 Reasons to Explore Poetry Anthologies by Sylvia M. Vardell

An Interview with Tabatha Yeatts by Madelyn Rosenberg

IMPERFECT is part of Jama Rattigan's Nine Cool Things on a Tuesday

A middle school teacher's thoughts on IMPERFECT at Carol's Corner

Heidi Mordhorst on IMPERFECT

Robyn Hood Black shares about IMPERFECT sewing and more

Linda Mitchell talks about mistake making and IMPERFECT

Keri Collins Lewis on making IMPERFECT happen

Irene Latham interviews Tabatha

Ruth Hersey reviews IMPERFECT

Michelle Heidenrich Barnes shares her IMPERFECTions

What I Can Control (and What I Can't)

“Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over, instead of craving control over what you don’t.”
~Unknown

As you can see in this chart, apologizing falls in the "What I Can Control" circle, but "Others Forgiving Me" doesn't. "Past Mistakes" is outside the circle, but "Trying Again" is inside. Hang tight to the things you can control! Don't give up!

Artist Jen Hewett's Pudding

At the start of every new project, I have to remind myself that I probably won't like anything I do for the first few hours or days of it, and that this is all just part of the process. My sketchbooks are filled with ugly, not-good work, but often the important thing is to get the ick out of my system so I can move on.
~Jen Hewett

Jen Hewett

Jen Hewett was always creative, but it wasn't until she was an adult that she felt free to explore her creativity, because that involved trying things, making mistakes, and failing. She shared a family story about learning from mistakes:

[Auntie Maude] told me about her mother, my Great Grandmother Elma...my favorite story was about my great grandmother’s attitude towards cooking mishaps. She was a talented cook, but sometimes her cakes didn’t rise properly. “My mother never called those failures,” Auntie Maude said. “She’d slice that cake, pour some cream on top, and call it a ‘pudding.’ And we loved those puddings.”

...at the end of that year... the cake I’d made for my parents’ church’s Christmas brunch didn’t quite turn out the way I’d planned. So I channeled my great grandmother, and salvaged it as she would have. I sliced that cake into tiny bits, then added some frosting, a pint of cream, and a handful of frozen raspberries scavenged from the back of the freezer. While serving the cake, I recounted my Auntie Maude’s story, and my mom declared it the best dessert she’d ever had.

Cakes, life, work – none of these things have ever turned out quite as planned, but out of it all has come quite a bit of pudding, and immense gratitude for the lessons of failure.

Sometimes we have to just leave the ick in our notebooks, but sometimes we can turn our mistakes into pudding. Are you ready to do both?

IMPERFECT Video

A video for IMPERFECT made by a high school senior:

Don't Be So Hard on Yourself

Have you ever been slow to figure something out? It happens to everybody!

Embroider Your Mistakes

Austin Kleon has a fun post (that mentions kintsugi!) about how his wife took his son's mistake -- drawing on the sofa -- and embroidered it:

Just in case you want to try to embroider something, here's a "how to" video.

Do unto others?

Sometimes when we have to try to fix a mistake we've made (or maybe when we're trying not to make a mistake in the first place), we might use the motto "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" to guide us. It's a good motto, but only if we really understand it.

If I hate surprise parties and you love them, then if we thought of "Do unto others" as meaning "Throw the other person the kind of party you would want to have," we would be way off base.

BUT if we understand "Do unto others" as meaning "Care about what other people want as you would have them care about what you want," we are much more liable to make good choices and offer meaningful apologies.

Listening can be hard -- we think we know the best answer already or we think everybody feels the same way we do. The only way to know for sure how another person feels, though, is to hear them out. Being a good listener can be a real superpower if you can develop it.

In this video, some people are trying to be helpful, but only the one who cares about what Jason wants enough to listen to him hits the ball out of the park.

Brain Freeze

Everybody says the wrong thing sometimes. Even if you know a lot about something, you might forget the word you wanted to say. For instance:

It's always nice if you can laugh about it afterwards!

On Walking Through the Front Door

photo of Lucy by Cara

A tanka poem today about furry friends who really don't care how imperfect you are!

"On Walking Through the Front Door"

those days when I scale
the highest peaks, your tail wags
and those days when I have
failed miserably and more
than once, your tail wags

© Carol Wilcox, 2019

Life as a Video Game

Mark Manson has some interesting ideas about how life is like a video game. He calls some mistakes that people make "Distractions" and says people can make a habit of making the same mistakes. Do you agree with his ideas? Do you have different ideas? He says:

Life is a big and complex game. It’s the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats and we’re placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages...

Life is designed to continually throw difficult and unexpected problems at you. Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved. If at any point, Life runs out of problems to give us, then as players, we will unconsciously invent problems for ourselves.

Players may respond to problems with either Solutions or Distractions...

Solutions are actions and pursuits that resolve a problem preventing it from continuing or happening again in the future. Distractions are actions or pursuits designed to either make the Player unaware of the problem’s existence or to dull the pain the problem may be causing...

The more each Solution or Distraction is used, the easier and more automatic it will be in the future. The more often you use a Solution or Distraction, the easier it will be to use again, to the point where it will eventually become unconscious and automatic. Once a Solution or Distraction is unconscious and automatic, it becomes a Habit.

A player, once they’ve found a Solution to a Level, must employ that Solution enough times to make it a Habit, thus mastering that level and allowing them to move on to the next Level...

Good luck Player One.

Perfection: Possible?

Abstract Art by Anne Van Camp

A poem written for Today's Little Ditty's June challenge:

Perfection

You might think that somebody knows
how to have highs without any lows
but everyone loses,
has bumps and has bruises --
that's just the way that it goes.

by Tabatha Yeatts

Hidden in the Seams

I am reminded that every day I have the chance to pick up a needle and some thread and add to the story.
~Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Robyn Hood Black made a video to go with her IMPERFECT poem!

Word for someone who learns from mistakes

On Twitter, Jason Kander tweeted that he and his wife Diana had been discussing whether there is a word that means “someone who learns from their mistakes”? He asked, "If not, what should that word be?"

People suggested:

Scientist
Wise
Reconstructed
Self-reflective
Strategist
Mature person
Meliorist (someone who improves, makes things better)
Hindsighter
Life-long student
Learner

I especially like "strategist" and "learner," but my very favorite is this:

Butterhander, from the German verb handschmieren, i.e., you get burned, put butter on your hand, and move on.

Do you have any words you would add?