Perfectionism

Looking back, even to when I was a child, one of my most persistent character traits is perfectionism. For much of the time, I've seen it as a positive thing, but now I'm far from being convinced that that's the right view. I had an autograph book when I was about 10 or 11, very thin on autographs of anyone well-known, and long since lost, but I remember verbatim what my dad wrote when he signed it - 'Whatever I am doing, I always do my best'. That seemed to me to be a philosophy worth emulating, but as time has gone on, I think that I've misunderstood what he was getting at. His idea was to do his best, but if things didn't work out, don't dwell on the disappointment, learn from the experience and move on. I, on the other hand, tend to err to the side of wanting to be the best, despite the impossibility of that aspiration, and as a result sometimes being unrealistically self-critical (and even, rarely, critical of others), to the point of dredging up events that happened years in the past - there are things that happened when I was 18 that still make me cringe today, even though I seriously doubt whether anyone apart from me remembers them. My blog often falls foul of the same syndrome - I spend so much effort on making sure that the choice of words and phraseology, the spelling, punctuation and grammar (to regress to the schoolroom) are all as good as I can manage, that the spontaneity of what I write, the life and soul of the enterprise, is lost. As an example, the idea I referred to in the post 'A new story' has so far amounted to 3 draft paragraphs in almost a month, the irony being that if I published any of it, in however perfect or imperfect a state, I'd be lucky if more than a handful of people even read it. I often complain about the modern world being obsessed with style over substance, while being guilty of exactly the same offence.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B