Forget Your Perfect Offering

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen Time was, I had control over the things my kids did and saw each day. But now that they are living and moving in a space outside my living room, I must watch as things that are beyond my control slowly shape and mold the person they are inside. Last year, my oldest daughter had a 5th grade teacher who changed a little piece of who she was. This teacher was a normal-enough educator, a person skilled in her trade but one who trusted too much in the power of public humiliation. If one of her 10-year-old charges wrote something wrong in their heading or didn't precisely follow her instructions, she roared and flailed and ripped up the project and threw it in the trash. Not always; just sometimes, but the erratic nature of it made it worse in the eyes of her students, not better. They never knew what they were going to get. One by one, the kids in her class became afraid to make mistakes. My daughter began checking her homework, seven or eight times, then checked it again three or four times to make sure it was still in her folder, so she could make sure that she, for one, would be flying under the radar that day. So she wouldn't feel the mocking scorn of a displeased teacher, the flush of her skin when her name was called, summoning her to the front of the class. My daughter has always been prone to perfectionism - for whatever reason. And because my husband and I know that road fairly well, we've tried to push her down another one. But the world is wide and the teachers are many, and there's only so much you can do. Plus, we tell ourselves, it's good for her to have a range of experiences, to grow and to learn from people of a variety of temperaments. Still, it's frustrating because, since she was two years old, we have extolled the virtues of not being afraid to make mistakes. We have spouted quotes by Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan. We have reminded her that you learn more from your failures than your successes. That – if you're trying hard enough – you are going to make mistakes and they are not only okay, they are necessary, essential, expected. And some of those words get in, but I rather believe it is her art that has saved her – as it as saved so many of us. She is healed by her own closed door and by the time at her easel, because it allows her to see – on some level of deeper consciousness - how sometimes things don't turn out the way they were supposed to, and how they often take on a deeper beauty for the detour. When she is painting and she makes a mistake, she can take the piece in a different direction, layering more decisions on top until she has something that doesn't resemble the initial project but instead becomes something all its own, emerging like a flowering peony, a blooming blend of different decisions – of various forms of intention and light. Art and creativity allow us to luxuriate in freedom; to relish and savor the sheer act of choice. These are choices that are important, and all our own. These are choices that don't linger because, before you can worry too much about one choice, another presents itself and then, all at once, you are designing and fashioning – without much thought or pretense. You are simply flowing. You are simply creating. You are simply living. There's a lot at stake when our kids decide they are afraid to try. They start to take themselves too seriously. They start to care too much about their image. They start to care too much about the end result and less about the process. And the older I get, the more I realize it's ALL process. It's all about the flow, the creating, the living. And so I will continue to buy her sketchbooks and charcoal, acrylics and canvas, and I will be her soft place to fall; a soft place to bring news of both failures and fruits; offerings and cracks and light.