Do you have a word you use all the time? My Jamaican-American mother-in-law’s word is “crazy”. If she can’t get her laptop to work, “This computer crazy.” When she doesn’t hear her cell phone and misses a call, “My phone crazy, man.” If she disagrees with someone’s life choices, of course, “He crazy!”
It was my husband who pointed her special word out to me, and whenever anything goes wrong or seems strange, we’ll laugh and imitate his mom, with extra emphasis on the first syllable, just like her: “That’s CRAzy.” (His mother is now living with us indefinitely, so pretty soon everyone is going to call me crazy.)
I didn’t think I had a trademark word until my husband pointed it out to me as well. It’s “perfect”. When we finish planning to meet somewhere, I’ll conclude with “Perfect.” A waiter seats us by the window, and I’ll exclaim, “This is perfect!” A parking place in front of our house is “Perfect!” I like someone’s shoes, and “They’re the perfect shoes with that outfit.”
I use this word so much that you might think the idea of perfection has lost all meaning for me. In reality, I’m so saturated with the idea of perfection that it’s overflowing into my everyday wording for commonplace situations. “Perfect” is like saying “great” with a boost. Why settle for less?
As I prepared for my “D+ Dressing without Stressing” workshop in May, I began to question my presumption that we’re all going for perfection all the time. Was I trying to tell my D+ audience how to dress perfectly? If so, I needed to call and cancel the workshop because there was no way I could perform under that sort of pressure. In the end, I decided that my goal was to show my audience how certain details make a difference in our appearance . . . details that I’ve learned about while blogging and that I wish someone had told me about long ago. It was up to my audience to play with the details for themselves.
Because I automatically assume that the goal is perfection in every undertaking, the realization that perfection isn’t always the goal is raising a lot of questions for me. And it’s made me curious as to what others think on the subject. So this month, we’re going to delve into this topic. We won’t write about it every day, but at least one Hourglassy writer will cover it each week, and we’ll link to other bloggers who have decided to write about this theme. Plus, we have some great guest writers lined up as well.
It’s going to be perfect! 🙂
