In art and architecture, what looks like a mistake is often a deliberate signal meant to attract the attention of insiders to a particular aspect of the work.

• In the Zen tradition, “wabi-sabi” objects, carefully crafted to be intentionally imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete, are considered most beautiful – their humble elegance transcending fads and fashion.

• In music, notes that deviate from an established pattern are often used to create emotional tension.  Beethoven was fond of this technique.  In the Third Symphony’s “Funeral March”, for example, he replaced sounds with silences to express the mounting sense of sorrow in the piece.

I imagine a different world, one in which people do not spend an inordinate amount of energy fuming against their fate each time they made a mistake.  A world in which one takes for granted that if things go wrong, they probably will.

It would be so civilized.  Folks would bump into furniture, miss deadlines, get lost on the way to the airport, forget to return phone calls, and show up at parties a day early, without getting unduly annoyed with themselves.

You and I would not be personally insulted when we dropped the sugar bowl on the floor, back the car into the mailbox, burned the dinner while on the phone or failed to meet our quarterly projections. 

We are convinced that getting it right is a matter of survival. Surrounded as we are by machines, we feel that we must perform flawlessly to stay ahead of the game.  An industrial-age mentality keeps us all on the steep and narrow path of productivity. 

Unfortunately, thinking that being right will save us from being wrong is a misapprehension.  While, in the last decade, we have labored to be as accurate as our machines, these same machines have been redesigned to be as impulsive as we are.  Today, some of the most advanced electronic devices, from satellites to pacemakers, are engineered to be partly inconsistent, in accordance with the dramatic finds of “chaos scientists.”

Today, in various fiends, from space exploration to stock market predictions, computers are programmed to be quirky on purpose… A case in point is an energy-efficient Japanese dishwasher, designed to be “chaotic.” That gets china, glass, and silverware cleaner by using two rotating arms that spin erratically.

In our day and age, the irrational is on the cutting edge. More and more, you are likely to run into people who will explain to you that… progress is knowing less and less about more and more. 

What a bummer?  Not at all.  Letting of basic assumptions is as exciting as looking at earth from space.  You feel something like a delicious vertigo, a sense of weightlessness.

Next time you break a plate or lose your keys, or jump to false conclusions, why not take it in stride?  Consider the possibility that there is a hidden pattern behind your random acts of blunderism.

Until this paragraph, words here today are those of another sharedbecause the thoughts are better than any original ones I have this morning.  It is rare to open up a book that grabs my attention so quickly and completely as “The Art of Imperfection” did.  It is even rarer for me to include so much of another writer’s material as I have today.  The borrowed words that fill this blog come directly from the first chapter of the book because I was moved to share what touched me so deeply.   With these thoughts once again I am reminded imperfections are perfect as they are.  They make me who I am; no less; no more.  I am grateful for my “perfectly imperfect” self.  

Kudos go to Veronique Vienne for her meaningful words
and Erica Lennard for her remarkable photography that fill their little,
but very meaningful book titled “The Art of Imperfection”.  

It is as hard to see one’s self
as to look backward without turning around. 
Henry David Thoreau