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