There are two kinds of people, one holding that the world is perfect, the other saying that it is imperfect. Though they behold the same world and pass through similar experiences, one of them still holds this view, the other that. Which of them is right?
You might think it is the fool who calls it perfect – after all, how many faults and shortcomings does the world have? The avocado's stone is too big, life is too short, but oh, how slowly it passes all the same… It would be folly to claim that the world is perfect. So the clever one maintains that the world is imperfect. Or are the roles the other way round? It is the fool who calls the world imperfect, for, after all, there is avocado around the stone, and life is exactly as long as it should be, everything is in its place. The sage discovers perfection even in imperfection. For him a limit is not a finished fact but a direction, the part points to the whole, and disharmony prefigures harmony. He sees only two kinds of people, the good and the … good-to-be.
It is not merely a matter of forging a virtue out of weakness. That would be the strategy of the ignoble. To cry thief at a thief is no sin, that is a fact. Truth is truth, and error is error. Wise discernment reaches further than merely stating the facts. If you are your fellow man's judge, you can list all his faults and sins, and even if you take the mitigating circumstances into account, you can pass sentence on him for ruining his own destiny, as a continuing offence, as a repeat offender, on multiple counts and with particular cruelty. Be his counsel for the defence instead…
The universe is not made up of the outstanding alone. We are strong and weak alike, learned and foolish, quick and slow to act. One of man's most distinctive traits is that he is unfinished. If not a single good trait could be added to his character any more, not a single shortcoming remedied, no weakness turned into strength, how dull the world would become. Such perfection would knead the world into a sterile, dull and unremarkable mass. To be unfinished is not mere imperfection, not a lack arising from an earlier state, but the promise of what is to come, the possibility of perfection. That is why it is true that not only the outstanding are needed. It is not at the end that we must begin the process of becoming perfect. In the ignorance of beginnings, when we cannot yet even grasp our shortcomings, everything seems so simple. The end of the road is easy and straight again – it is only along the way that there are pitfalls. If you are lucky, you can leap from the beginning to the end, but do not be surprised if you get stuck halfway. Imperfection is human.
Divine Right Angle
After they had spent days helping out at a godforsaken Orthodox monastery, battling for every single square metre they cleaned and levelled, the craftsman, once the work was done, began to apologise: this corner had been missed, that solution had not come out perfect, here things had fallen a little short, there they had run a little over. The monastery's wily monk waved the apologies aside: ‘Come now, the good Lord is almighty, and yet he never managed to make a single right angle in all creation!’
And man wants to cram fullness into his mind, or to measure winged time with precision? What a vain attempt!
Well then, who is right? Is the world perfect or not? Perhaps this is not a yes-or-no question. In terms of fact, the world – with all its shortcomings – is certainly perfect, while at the level of feeling it is just as you are: if you are still incomplete – then you see the world as incomplete too, and if you are already whole, then as whole. Wise seeing perceives the future in the present, the flawless hero in the weak man, fullness in lack. The perfection of the world is imperfection, and man's own is incompleteness. Out of this, fullness can be made.