I came across a challenging comment the other day, by the writer and broadcaster Monica Furlong. She suggests that we need to “renounce perfection for wholeness”. This strikes me as an alternative formulation of an idea I have encountered in different guises on several occasions. It has been with me for the past couple of days, and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it, particularly in relation to my art activity.
Intuitively I find this a very sympathetic idea, and I have always been grateful for the fact that I have been able to gain experience of so many different aspects of life …. scholarship, art, sport, gardening, travel, literature …. and so on. I have, in other words, tended to commit myself to the pursuit of “wholeness” at the expense off “perfection”. There has often been the nagging suspicion, however, that it would have been nice to do something really well for a change. Too often I am aware, looking at something I have done, that the possible improvements are rather obvious, and that if only I had applied myself with greater persistence, diligence, critical intelligence, or what have you, that the result would have been so much more worthwhile. “Perfection” might well be an unattainable goal, but “pretty good” surely is not too much to expect.
Looked at from another angle, I always wonder whether people who are truly eminent in their field might be missing something essential about being human. What have they sacrificed (I ask myself) in order to be where they are? The belief could be a comfortable illusion, of course, that if only I were to have focussed my endeavours more narrowly at an earlier stage in life I could actually have achieved highly in that field. Where does that mysterious ingredient “talent” fit into this?
Perhaps the choice here is a matter of temperament, so that it is not a real choice. If I am temperamentally disposed to the pursuit of “wholeness”, maybe I would only make myself very unhappy by attempting to realise something for which I am constitutionally unsuited. Even so, I think I’ll hang onto “pretty good” as a realisable ambition.