Warts and all

Warts and all. The perfection of imperfection.

Engineer, in industry. Things had to be right, spot on, perfect, otherwise the thing would prematurely fail or produce poor quality. A mindset of: control, tight tolerances, and ‘flat, square and parallel’ was instilled, from day one.

Photographer, in nature and sport. Colour, shape, and texture changed by the second. Things moved quickly, I had no control over what happened, I just had to have the mind set to capture it the best I could. This was in conflict with the engineer mind set.

Sports player. You could train and plan and prepare to be the best you could be, but the opposition always had different ideas and set out to disrupt your plans and force theirs. Totally in conflict with the engineer’s mindset, control was at best 50%. And things were coming at you at a pace, the level of fluidity was huge.

Life: (A nod to William Shakespeare, in As You Like It)

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.

Life being the most fluid of all, the most conflicting and contradictory of all, the least perfect of all.

Or is it?

What about taking this moment as being all there is. The past is locked away in the vaults of history, the future is blurry at best.

I keep coming back to this concept that ‘now’ is all there is. It is a state that I have struggled with and led to a lot of my anxiety. I have often wished that past events could have been different, and spent hours suffering through those thoughts, often at 3am. How many can relate to that?

But they weren’t different. They were as they had played out. Freedom starts when you can accept that ‘I did say that thing’ or ‘I did do that act’. Or in fact ‘I didn’t say or do the thing'. And is the memory factual? It is incomplete at best, and visually one sided. Whatever, all of it is locked away, never to be changed.

My coach James says repeatedly that all disappointment is wishing things were different.

The wishing is lovely and cuddly and soft and warm and familiar, and draining and stifling and frustrating and keeping you where you are. And building anxiety.

Where wishing can be useful is when you wish upon a shooting star, because in that moment you get a glimpse of what is meaningful to you, where your drive might come from, maybe an ambition, but certainly a desire.

And in that moment you can start to put some meat on the bones of that wish, start to create a plan of 'how', start to think of a 'when'. But most importantly start to believe, start to act.

The acting, the doing, the list, is done in the now, with a reflection of the past and a vision of the future.

But through your hardships of things that have happened to you, through your fuck-ups of things that have happened by you, the vision is created, and with action in the ‘now’ it can start to become a reality.

The you, the whole you, and nothing but the you, fuck-ups and hardships, warts and all, is all you need, in fact the vision would not be a vision without them, and you don't get a vision for no reason, and only you can realise that vision. No pressure then. Your worthiness is never in doubt, except by yourself. England rugby captain Will Carling said that 'we are all riddled with self-doubt', the job is to keep working on lifting yourself out of that quicksand, games, and life, are not won in the quicksand. And the job never stops.

But it is worth it. And so are you. Warts and all, it is the perfection of imperfection.