Allowing Myself to be Imperfect

Insights Gained During my First Meditation of the Year

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To start 2025 off right, I decided that my first action of the year would be to meditate. I routinely meditate in the evenings, so this early-morning session was a bonus. All was going rather well until I noticed an objective, a goal, a distracting thought; I wanted the exercise to provide me with an idea for my next essay. You see, I had missed one week of my regular Substack publication schedule while spending Christmas in Tucson, Arizona, and I was feeling a little pressured to get back on track.

Be here now, I reminded myself, and refocused on my breath.

The rest of my meditation went peacefully for the most part, and after I finished and stretched a little bit, it came to me, probably in response to that desire to get my publication pattern back on track, that during this new year, I’d like to become more intimately aware of my motivations and from whence they stem; which of them arise from innate strengths and proclivities and which relate to a need to prove myself in some way; which may lead to discovery and growth and which to feelings of emptiness and disappointment.

It takes patience and follow-through to distinguish the difference between helpful and unhelpful thoughts and impulses, watching the inner process of cause and effect as it unfolds, taking notes, and adjusting my behavior in response. It takes some quiet attention, through meditation, through solo walks, sometimes through journaling—thoughtful time undistracted by social media, books, conversations, and movies. To know oneself, one must be willing to pay attention and put in the time and effort. So, I knew that if I was going to make this a new year’s resolution of sorts, I’d better mean it.

I then reached over to my bookshelf of “spiritual” and mindfulness literature and picked up Krishnamurti’s Freedom from the Known. I opened it to the first page in which I’d at some point in the past left a sticky-note, and here is what I read:

What we are now going to do… is to learn about ourselves… taking a journey together, a journey of discovery into the most secret corners of our minds. And to take such a journey we must travel light; we cannot be burdened with opinions, prejudices and conclusions—all that old furniture we have collected for the last two thousand years and more. Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.

What a perfect beginning to the new year! Applying the innocence and freshness of a newborn baby, or a visitor to a new country, to this unknown landscape called “me.”

This resolve to understand one’s motivations more deeply is not a selfish goal, by the way. Learning about the self is learning about others, because all of us live in the same world, we’re made of the same stuff, we’ve for the most part assimilated the same messages about love and God, success and satisfaction, duty and responsibility.

“Know Thyself” is a maxim originally inscribed on the Greek Temple of Apollo in the 5th century BC. It can be interpreted in any way you like, but be careful not to confuse knowing oneself with labeling oneself or identifying oneself with a particular quality or ideology. As Krishnamurti mentions in the chapter quoted above, “...we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting.”

Buddhism speaks repeatedly of impermanence as a defining characteristic of life, and there are good—and scientific—reasons why. The Italian theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, writes, in The Order of Time, “The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence.” He adds, “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.”

So, who you were yesterday is not necessarily who you are today, or will be tomorrow.

Here is a Note I recently published on Substack:

Does identifying with a “type” help us feel secure in some way, protect us from threats to our self-esteem? Are these ramparts we build out of the comfortable and familiar going to help us when the world changes and we don’t? (And by the way, I believe that calling oneself a freak or a weirdo is really just another defensive device. If I call myself weird, then I’ve beat you to the punch, preemptively hijacked your potentially hurtful words.)

It takes courage and honesty to really know the self and one’s motivations, rather than merely defending the identifications and labels one has become attached to. It’s scary to admit that you yelled at your spouse because she threatened your self-image, or that you judged that person ahead of you in line for their ill-fitting clothes, or that your as-yet unfulfilled dream isn’t even what you really want, it’s just a desire for status or attention (I am speaking, of course, of myself here). But there is freedom on the other side of these admissions. Allowing oneself to be imperfect opens up a universe of space to move and grow, to understand oneself and others better, to evolve along with new information.

Yes, it is important and healthy to feel fulfilled in one’s life, to self-actualize, which, to me, means freely exploring one’s natural talents and proclivities (you’ve been drawn to music since you were a child; you’ve always been good at working with your hands; you have an innate urge to understand human behavior). But in the long run, I have found it necessary to first understand why I compare myself to others, why I feel compelled to prove myself, why I judge my progress against standards I’ve absorbed from the competitive society I live in. I have to remove these unhelpful compulsions, by acknowledging the insecurity behind them, before I can freely head in the direction my essence would guide me.

When I was young I used to tell myself, “I don’t want to be a garbage man, but if I did, it would be okay.” I guess even then I knew there were artificial value systems affecting my ability to decide on a path that was right for me. Finding my way through those complex feelings and motivations, some of them my own, many of them ignorantly assimilated from my peers and mentors, was not ever easy.

The point I’m really trying to make here is that humility, the willingness to admit one’s human flaws and weaknesses (for instance, that I really would have been embarrassed to be a garbage collector), to own up to one’s mistakes and faulty views, one’s imperfections, both past and present; to accept being a life-long learner, an empty vessel, with nothing to prove; that act of making oneself vulnerable, rather than putting you at risk of shame or loss, is going to poise you for a much deeper sense of well-being in the long run.

Humility equals happiness, in my opinion.

So, to bring it around to that distracting thought that arose during my New Year’s meditation, the one where I was hoping my meditation would provide me with a subject for my next essay: Yes, I was motivated by my attachment to the consistency I have developed on Substack over the past year, and am obviously clinging to. But in a classic case of cosmic irony, I have also been granted my wish, haven’t I? 😁

DB

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Books Mentioned

Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

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