Every year about this time, I get the same pre-school jitters I used to get when I was teaching middle school. After over forty years of being in the teaching field, those old habits die hard. There were parents at open houses looking me over, a classroom to clean up after a summer of sitting empty, lesson plans to prepare, and seating charts to get up to speed. I don’t remember getting a good night sleep for about a month after that whirlwind beginning – I was on an adrenaline rush, working to make everything perfect as my kids stepped into the art room.
I remember my first year as a newbie being particularly nervous. Would I fit in with the other faculty members? Were kids going to compare me to the old art teacher before me? Would I be able to handle a student who had a temper tantrum? My mind was racing with a thousand questions as kids filed in that first day of school.
Recognizing that my perfectionism was working overtime, my pastor gave me some good counsel:
“Jeff,” he began, “There are two types of drivers. The first type pulls into a gas station and decides to clean their windshield while they wait for their tank to fill. They clean every square inch, corner to corner, underneath the wipers – and make sure their windshield is spotless before they can drive off. Then there’s the other type. This driver pulls in to get gas, but he cleans only the part of his windshield he needs to be able to see the road in front of him when he drives off.”
I was all ears and beginning to see myself in his story.
“If I was you this first year,” he continued, “I would give one hundred percent to the things you love– like the art – and fifty percent to everything else. No one is expecting you to be perfect at what you know nothing about, so don’t stress about it. Just give 100 percent to the part that you need to get you down the road, and enjoy the ride!”
Hmmm, I thought. That makes a lot of sense to me, and as my year roared on, my pastor’s philosophy held me in good stead. I took a lot of little things off my plate and put my efforts into teaching art until I got a better grasp on how to do the whole job. I probably messed up a lot of spots on that great windshield of teaching, but I certainly got to see a lot of the scenery.
However, it’s probably true that I come by my perfectionism honestly. With both my parents being in the medical field, they took on a lot of responsibility and held themselves to a high standard in their work, and at home. That was particularly true of my physician father. Can you imagine the reaction of his nurse if she heard this from my father during a kidney operation?
“Oh, darn! Would you look at that? Looks like I made a cut on the wrong side! Oh drat! Hey – everyone makes mistakes, right? Let’s just move this over there, ok, now shift this part around, and nurse, you got a little scotch tape lying around? Yea, yea, that Elmers will work…ok…pour a little right there… and…Voila!”
Of course, those words would not bode well for his patient’s future heath, or for my father’s reputation either. People expected him to be perfect because that was his area of expertise.
Yet, for most activities we engage in, trying to do everything perfect gets in the way of completing much of anything else. In one of my favorite books, authors M. Scott Peck addresses this idea of being perfect and writes about how our perfectionistic tendencies can lead to all kinds of destructive behaviors such as belittling and blaming and well, just being plain mean to our fellow human beings.
He writes that while most of us try to do our best, things get shaky when we can’t admit that we fail from time to time and then try to cover it up. That’s when trouble brews. Peck says we always have two sets of values competing for our attention, good ones and some not so good ones, and that it is impossible to stand in both places and do either location justice. He says choosing the human option lowers our high expectation of life and brings on more healthy options. Food for thought isn’t it?
Interestingly, if you hang out around a child for just five minutes, you’ll be reminded to lighten up and laugh more at your own imperfections. Kids, those little munchkins of never-ending spills and thrills, seem to have a natural talent for being able to take in the moments and help us enjoy the ride. They can be our greatest teachers when we get mired in our own self-importance.
For example, I’ve been trying to teach my four-year-old granddaughter Lyla how to tell a knock-knock joke. I started with an easy one, you know – knock-knock, whose there, Dwain, Dwain who, dwain the bathtub I’m dwownding. I thought this will be a lot of fun.
Lyla and I practiced it together a number of times with me mouthing the words to her while she learned the different parts. Everything was fine until it came time for us to do it together and then Lyla suddenly found every single line to be funny. She laughed at the ‘knock-knock part, she laughed at ‘whose there’ and thought ‘dwain the bathtub’ was downright hilarious. No matter how many times I tried to teach her how a joke is supposed to work, she continued to find every single word of the joke funny.
Now if you are trying to teach a four-year-old how to tell a joke, I’ve got to tell you it takes some of the fun out of it when they laugh at you every time you begin speaking. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I found myself getting frustrated as Lyla continued to rehearse a line and then burst out laughing.
“Lyla,” I said to her, “you only get to laugh one time, ok?”
She stared at me, full of focus.
“It’s just one joke, and you laugh at the end of it. Do you understand?”
Yes, she nodded.
“So, what are you going to say after I say knock-knock?”
She burst out laughing.
That’s it, I thought. Done. I quit. This just isn’t going to plan. And the joke, I pouted, really wasn’t that funny to begin with.
But how do you explain that to a kid?
Well, I think you have to let go of that adult shell, the hardened part of us, the part that M. Scott Peck would call the lie we tell ourselves – that we can make it all perfect! We learn to be happy with the clean part of our windshield knowing that leaves a lot of road out there to see and enjoy!
I thought a good way to end this session is to share another knock-knock joke I tried with Lyla, …here we go…
Me: Knock, knock.
Lyla: Whose there?
Me: Perfectionist
Lyla: Perfectionist who?
Me: Who? Who? Dwain the bathtub, I’m dwownding…
Lyla: (walking away) I can’t do it anymore… (walking away frustrated…)