Striving for Perfection

My colleague, Greg, and I have recently started a sesquipedalian word swap in the hopes of improving our vocabulary. Yesterday, in my search for a word to share with him, I came across the term Arête. No, not “Stop” in French but rather the Greek term arête which literally means excellence and virtue. According to my source, Arête implies:

 “a humble and constant striving for perfection and self-improvement combined with a realistic awareness that such perfection cannot be reached. As long as an individual strives to do and be the best, that individual has arête. As soon as the individual believes he has actually achieved arête, however, he or she has lost that exalted state and fallen into hubris, unable to recognize personal limitations or the humble need to improve constantly.”

Those Ancient Greeks..they sure had a lot figured out. It must have been all that time spent in the Agora postulating with one another and perhaps their constant warring helped them get close to death and ponder ontology.

I like this idea of arête and hubris. It seems like a good idea to be constantly striving for your personal best, but most of all, I think it's great that they include a caveat - to be aware that such perfection can’t actually be reached.  I’d say this is a great way to live because as soon as you think you have it all figured out, you’re in trouble. This applies on so many scales.

Yourself 
The truth is, you're always changing and growing as an individual. Even those who do not like change and remain stuck in their ways would find that they are actually changing, but investing a lot of energy into trying to stay the same. It’s all about the stories you tell yourself and others (see previous blog). As soon as you think you’ve got yourself figured out with the stories you tell yourself, you become stagnant and unable to choose the life you want to live. You become closed off to further growth and self-development. In essence, you loose control of yourself and your life.

Relationships

Of course this applies to relationships of all kinds.  We all know it’s best not to think you have someone figured out because they’re constantly evolving and growing themselves. As soon as you think otherwise, you put them into a box and place constraints on them (and on your relationship).  You may even catch yourself making assumptions about them and how they will act that end up being proven wrong. Awesome! Because this helps to remind you that you haven't got it all figured out. Imagine, instead, constantly striving for the best relationship, but accepting that it will never be the best so you can look forward to learning how to improve it along the way. 

Science

Science is constantly pushing the boundaries of knowledge in hot pursuit of perfect understanding.  However, how many scientific 'truths' later become dis-proven by new discoveries? Science can continually strive for perfect understanding but must never be used as a tool to give evidence that any form of perfect understanding has been reached. This could apply to religion and spiritual teachings as well.

Government/Country/Politics/Issues
Don’t give up because you think things will always go as they have before – that’s when we’re all in trouble! We need to have hope that things can change and that they do change.  A perfect political system must always be the goal but no politician, country, or community must ever believe they have reached the perfect system, as this system will need to continually be adapted to represent the people who themselves are continually growing and changing.

So, good luck in your search for perfection and all the best of luck in remembering that you will never reach it..that the purpose of perfection is for it to always be a vision and not a destination. 

I think I’ll leave it there for today. After all, I know this post will never be perfect.