What is perfection? What is humanity?

These are some thoughts I was rolling around in my head before going into retreat at the beginning of July.  They’re ongoing contemplations for me, and I feel like I’ll probably come back around to them in the future.  

“No one’s perfect.” If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard this, I could have prevented 2 of Donald Trump’s bankruptcies.  I heard it a lot when I was younger, often followed by the exhortation to not be so hard on myself.  Good advice for sure.  Not that I ever took it.  The thing that I’m interested in now, though, is this seeming assumption that everyone knows exactly what ‘perfect' is and what it would look like personified.  For those of us educated in conventional school systems in the United States (and I would venture Canada and western Europe), perfect is a score that you can get on a test or a project.  It indicates that you made no mistakes.  This judgment comes from the teacher or other testmaker, who has indisputable objective access to ‘The Way Things Are’.  I honestly cannot remember whether I had a notion of perfect that preceded first grade, though I suspect that I may have, since the notion of ‘sin’ was introduced in Sunday School so that I could understand why Jesus was such an awesome dude.  In that case, God was the cosmic test maker and my conscience was the grader.  Though maybe not.  I was not taught that I could trust my conscience to inform me whenever I sinned.  Sometimes my conscience would tell me that I’d broken rules, lied or otherwise sinned, but not always. Thus the imperative for Jesus’ sacrifice for me.  I wasn’t even capable of asking for forgiveness for every sin, because I wasn’t aware of every sin.  Brokenness all the way down. 

“Good enough.”  In graduate school, one of the most important skills that I’ve begun to cultivate is how do perform ‘good enough.’  “Ya know, I really don’t think my exposition on perfection was as clear as it could’ve been.”  Maybe not, but it was ‘good enough’.  The perverse thing is that perfection has now migrated to time/effort management.  The new perfect is making sure every job is done just good enough.  Not too good; that invokes the law of diminishing returns.  To be competitive, everything must be optimized, including failure and mistakes.  

“I’m only human.”  Whenever, I hear someone citing limitations as the essence of their own or another’s humanity, I get angry.  What about insight, intelligence, or humor?  

Saying “I’m only human”, when you feel inadequate strikes me as what Trungpa Rinpoche called ‘idiot compassion’.  Idiot compassion is basically acting in a surface-level compassionate way to reduce your own discomfort.  It’s marked by self-deception.