When you look out over a wide vista, what do you see? Strong and stately mountains? An ocean, smooth and glassy? Or a winter wonderland of soft snow blanketing your city?
I went hiking the other day along a ridge line I’ve often admired while walking along the beach at Hanalei Bay. The rise of the earth above the river with the sheer cliffs and lush green trees beckoned. The scene resembling a live Hawaiian postcard of paradise.
We parked at the trailhead and began to hike up (and up and up). I imagined myself walking right into that postcard of perfection. Then there were the mosquitos, and the dead, rotting branches and the smell of rotting fruit. The trail itself was slick with mud, quickly caking layers onto my shoes.
Postcards don’t show the humidity of those lush, green, tropical forests. They don’t show the hard work it requires of your heart to climb a steep hillside for two miles. They don’t include the pungent odor of wet earth.
Yet it was beautiful. And it was real. It wasn’t perfect and yet my smile and energy and enthusiasm only grew as we continued hiking.
***
Along the trail, toward the top, I noticed a bright burst of pink peeking through the foliage. I sped up, intrigued, to investigate. It turned out to be something I (as a mainlander) had never seen on a hike before: an orchid—growing wild.
My perception of orchids is of carefully maintained and nurtured perfection. I look at an orchid in a flower shop, or at a wedding, and I think about the fragility of the petals and the attention needed to make the blooms so velvety and symmetrical.
Yet here were orchids growing wild. (Of course all things in nature have an origin, but I’d never given much thought as to where orchids came from; where they might show up on their own.) They are wild, pristine and stately flowers thriving in the midst of these island forests.
From the beach, looking at the postcard image, I hadn’t imagined this small bloom would greet me with such beauty (and I certainly couldn’t see it from so far away).
I leaned closer into the orchid to get a picture. There, on one of the petals, was a brown spot. Gasp! An imperfection on what I had formerly seen as absolute perfection. And yet, to me, it seemed so much more beautiful and alive.
The way I see it, nature’s perfection is in her imperfections. Our lesson is to realize this, extrapolate the concept, and embrace it for ourselves. We, as humans (and our lives), are perfectly imperfect.
So look again at the postcard-perfect image before you.
Go hiking, surfing, or snowshoeing and immerse yourself in that vista. Look around and notice the irregularities; the dead leaves; the broken branch; the ding on your surfboard and the shells kicking up and swirling around at the bottom of the sea.
How do they add to the beauty? To the experience? What would it be like if everything was indeed perfect? Would we be missing something?
I appreciate the variances and the uniqueness of how imperfections add to the character of a scene. I think about myself, my friends, and my community and am grateful for our imperfections and how they add balance and originality to the world around me.
Our life, in all its wild variations, truly is like beauty in nature: perfectly imperfect.
