Imperfect is the road ahead

There are days when if you stare at the blank page long enough, it stares back at you. At other times, the words just don't stop flowing. 

Those are the days when the world fits together just right. Every sentence leads into the next with all the smoothness of a butter knife gliding smoothly across the perfectly browned slice of toast. Why can't I have more days like this? 

The most obvious answer could be that no human ever functions at 100% at every single point in their life. Which is a perfectly valid answer, of course. And yet it's never really done it for me, the perfectionist that I am. 

It's an odd combination, to be fair - being both a creator and a perfectionist. And I know many who would agree with me on this. Though we can comprehend and even love the imperfections in the creations of others, our own imperfections seem like fatal flaws to us. We look at our writing and see the clunky combinations that make us despair of ever being as good as our favorite authors. A single line out of place ruins an entire piece for artists.

As we mourn our lack of perfection, it can seem a little insincere (and even a little bit like giving up too soon) when we try to tell ourselves that a 100% accuracy rate may not be within our reach. So for someone like me, I try to look at it from a completely different perspective. The speed bumps along the way - the writer's blocks, the one line that just won't fit into place - are there so that we can get past them eventually. And once we manage to cross over them, we are rewarded with a flow that seems so much sweeter, given how long it took to get there.

Because in the end, it's the effort that really makes it all worthwhile. You look back at the long nights, the restless pacing, the frenzied writing from the peak of your achievement and you let out a contented sigh. It was all worth it, after all.