A less than perfect day

It doesn't take much, just one good night's sleep and I'm ready to take on the world again. Thank you for your good wishes and prayers for Hanno, we both appreciate them. We'll go in later this morning and be home late this afternoon; no doubt there will be news to write about tomorrow.

A recent shared lunch at the Centre I work at.

But today I want to talk about perfection. I don't talk about it much, mainly because I don't believe many things are perfect, I rarely seek perfection and I tend to feel a bit uneasy when things look too good. I prefer to live in a slightly wobbly, less than perfect world. It suits my nature, I don't have to constantly measure myself against some "perfect" ideal and I learn so much when I make mistakes. Don't mistake perfection for happiness, they are two entirely different things.

If you were to ask me how I discovered how to do what I do I would probably tell you that my mistakes have taught me well. My mentors are books and the fading memories of the many things my mother and grandmother taught me. I also have the remarkable benefit of having grown up in a time when people did for themselves. But the mistakes I made along the way have taught me things I will never forget. When I first left home I tried to forget what I knew because I wanted to be modern, eat convenience foods and live more outside my home than in it. When I reversed that trend I found I still remembered much of what I was taught and saw but still, my main teacher were the mistakes I made.

Even with fresh seeds, not all seeds will germinate.

There is nothing better for making you remember a sequence, a recipe, a method, than putting time into something and then realising you have to start again. A mistake, that perfect teacher, makes you undo stitches, give food to the chooks and make a skirt into an apron, all because you did something wrong. But do you ever make that same mistake again - I don't, I learn from what I did wrong and redoing it cements it into my brain.

It doesn't have to match. Our old couch sits happily beside our new couch.

If you're starting off with knitting, sewing, crochet, soap making, homemaking or marriage, be kind to yourself when you make a mistake. See it as a gift. You won't waste too much of your project if you unpick and redo, and the process of doing it will be your teacher. Don't look for perfection, except if you are seeking a warm sunny day, a five out of five nest of new hatchlings, or the first glimpse of your new baby. They will all be perfect, most other things rarely are.

I applaud you if you set delicious meals on the table every night, if you never drop a stitch, or if you produce batch upon batch of perfect soap. But when you do make a mistake, don't beat yourself up about it. Be kind to yourself, let yourself enjoy all this life has to give you - even the mistakes. See a mistake for what it is - an opportunity to teach yourself. I remember the first time I tried to knit a headband. I unpicked that thing about 10 times before I got the tension and size right, and then it turned into a hat! But I learnt so much from that hat. It still shines as a bright beacon for me because it taught me not only how to knit hats and headbands, it taught me that wasting time on perfection sometimes gets in the way of what I want and need.

My own less than perfect day today will include taking my husband in for surgery, knitting, thinking about whether to replace a broken dishwasher, cooking, updating my diary and mapping out what I'm doing from now till Christmas, including deadlines (I really don't want to do that) and reading. There will be parts of today I don't like but overall it is a day just like all others to be mined for all the enjoyment I can find in it.

I wonder what you're doing on this less than perfect day.