Good enough is good enough

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too?  I thought I was the only one, ” wrote C.S. Lewis.  

 I like nothing better than when people respond to a post and engage in a conversation.  Already, I feel as though I making new friends and learning more about the extraordinary variety of human lives just by reading the stories of those who commented on Learning from Life.     Every one of them is growing through life and not just going through life.

The  famous (and my favorite) American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”   Our glories are in our “rising up” however we got on the floor.   How would we know how glorious we and life can be if we’ve not been broken,empty, lonely and in the dark?    

The Doctor thinks it’s grace.  “Years of healing in a day, a lifetime of healing in a few years. It is a gift so great that it cannot be hoarded, for hoarding destroys the gift: it must be shared.” And asks  “How many gifts do we have, buried under a hardened armor, awaiting the gracious trauma of a shattered shell?"  

We’ve survived and arrived at our third age, alive in this wonderful world, and our bodies show it, as they say 'our bodies incorporate our biographies'.   We know nothing can be perfect, life certainly isn’t and we’re certainly not.   We’re not fooled by the perfect faces and too skinny bodies of  Hollywood stars or the perfect homes in Architectural Digest.  We will never have the perfect holiday celebration Martha Stewart presents because the kids will fight, the cake will fall and Uncle Joe will get drunk again.   Being perfect is just too much work.  When we get this age, good enough is good enough. And we sense what Leonard Cohen sang, “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in."

Just by living, we’re beginning to develop a new aesthetic.  Instead of the shiny, glossy perfection we served as perfect fantasies, more and more of us are appreciating, the small, the modest, the imperfect and the worn.   The far older Japanese culture calls this aesthetic wabi-sabi, a catchall phrase that combines the notion of wabi (things that are fresh and simple) and sabi (things that have beauty stemming from age).

Our older faces and bodies, imperfect, worn, wrinkled and sagging yet still fresh and groomed are wabi-sabi.   They are lived in and experienced and real.   We no longer have the smooth, perfect blandness of our youthful faces and that’s good.   When older people try to look young, with plastic surgery, liposuction, collagen, implants and eyelifts they too often look like plastic fakes with their blank ,expressionless faces.    Whatever happened to Faye Dunaway or Robert Redford or even Nicole Kidman?  They’ve traded the worn softness of an older face, the depth and expression of wrinkles and sags for a hardness that’s glossy and shiny and chilling.    They’ve closed the cracks and their light is lost.  

After seeing Saraband, Igmar Bergman’s new film, Danny Miller writes not about the movie but about Liv Ullman’s “hauntingly beautiful face.”

“I know I’ve lived in southern California too long when the natural aging process starts to seem like an abnormality… watching her on the screen last night at the age of 66, I could not tear my eyes away.  How sick is it that I’m so used to actresses d’un certain âge doing anything in their power to look younger than their years that seeing Liv Ullmann’s lined face and aging skin nearly took my breath away? So that’s what it looks like!... Not that there’s anything wrong with youthful beauty, but don’t you agree that the lines and textures on Liv Ullmann’s face today allow for greater expression as an actress and a person than the blank slate of her once perfect complexion?.... I find the combination of a lived-in face and body and a lifetime of experiences so much more appealing”

Liv Ullman has wabi-sabi.  So do we all, when we cease the search for perfection, settle for the good enough and let the light of our lived-in lives shine through.