Quote: May I Never Be Complete

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect."

                          ~Chuck Palahnuik

This quote symbolizes man's constant progression throughout history and throughout his individual life. The definition of perfect changes from culture to culture and from time to time. Even in your own life your idea of perfection changes. We think of the perfect person as including notions of morality, of actions and thoughts alike, maybe of physical and mental fitness, and of our relationship to others whether they be through love or power. As it is constantly changing, and not absolute through space or time, how can we expect to reach this perfection. It's a cruel joke reminiscent of a Greek underworld. 

But the idea of perfection does not have to be totally dismissed, just shifted. Since there is no absolute perfection we must change the form of perfection from one of an end-result, to one of a process-result. Trying to understand what perfection means to us, what it means in our cultures and why humans have even come up with the concept of perfection is as close to perfect as we will come.

What does perfection have to do with survival? How did this hierarchy of imperfect to perfect evolve in our thinking? How has it been projected on to our world? We see it in media across the board, from technology to diets to relationships; we build it through art, in symmetrical skyscrapers, in Michelangelo's David and Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man; and we formulate it in our conscious. We judge ourselves against a perfect us, something that will never be achieved similar to drawing a perfect circle. The circle is an abstract concept, it does not exist in nature because it presupposes that everything does not move, that it is static. But the world is dynamic and therefore a perfect circle can not exist in our natural realities because it will always be moving and changing.