It is precisely because I do not have such poetic order within my life that I have allowed three months to slip by before continuing this blog series. I would not want to be more of a hypocrite than I am already by writing what I have failed to live out so far.
Yet I admit that nothing one does can ever be complete, spotless, all-encompassing. All I could aim towards, perhaps, is what another writer and thinker calls “Holistic Perfectionism.” In that even though nothing is perfect, one can still choose the trade-offs a project (or a piece, or a life) suffers through an intentional approach to interacting with the various factors that make up the process of actualization, creating something that may not be as pristine or as precise as you would like, but it is something that is good enough for what it’s for, when it’s needed.
An example of this process dropped itself across my digital wanderings last week: Herman’s journey with journaling. Instead of just writing a one-off post about how great and helpful this exercise (or hobby) is for him, he’s written what is now 3 connected posts on the changes, thoughts, and development of his approaches and self-discoveries over the 9 years he’s been journaling. (And still counting.) “Why I Started Journaling” flows into “Observations on 6 years of journaling” and then into last week’s post, “Plain text journaling“.
It requires humility and self-awareness to create something like this – a series documenting one’s growing understanding of a given activity, and the improvements implemented over time.
Simultaneously, however, this very process leads to greater trust and rapport between the creator and the reader; in a sense, it “qualifies” the person doing the thing to share their knowledge, even as it lays out his lack of perfection and/or spotty understanding for all to see.
It brings to mind the creator of a newsletter I’m subscribed to, Sonia Weiser. Sonia runs a newsletter for freelance writers, directing them to opportunities, jobs, and other industry tidbits. She recently launched an advice column titled “Accidentally Qualified” — an phrase that so well encapsulates the concluding point of this ramble. Perhaps we do not need to be “qualified” before we create, share, do something. We could become qualified through doing the things, thinking the things, playing around with the things.
If lies end up being told during such a process, they are unintentional, and hopefully imperfect enough so that you glimpse truth within them. It’s part of the learning process, choosing to be messy in public because not creating + sharing something until it’s perfect is an almost surefire way to guarantee my not doing anything.
Thus, read the rest of the “Poetic Order” series knowing it comes from someone who’s trying to figure out this thing called life from the perspective of poetry. It might not always make sense, nor the thoughts be entirely legible, or even be something you agree with. But it would be thoughtful, honest, and imperfect. And perhaps, it would even be useful, even if it’s not true.