Thoughts on Process and Perfection

I know I’m not alone in the sense of accomplishment I reap from a finished product, from things being done. My gut tells me that this is a very American thing, the admiration of things in their perfect states, in the states after we have perfected them: supermarket packages lined up in gleaming, colorful rows, clean laundry tucked into closed drawers, a spotless floor, a living room that looks as though it hasn’t been lived in, cars that look as though they’ve never been driven, even people who look as though they have not lived their entire lives in their own skin. There’s a certain obsession with wanting things to be perfect, with wanting things to be done, with wanting things to look as though we’re not messing around with them. In other words, there seems to be an overwhelming desire for product and a shunning of the process it takes to get there.

I had the same realization about life my freshman year of college. I was standing in the shower and bent over to get something. The water hit the back of my head, trailed around my face and shot off my nose and chin in two perfect streams. I felt like a flesh-and-blood fountain. I’m not sure why that struck me then, but it made me think, “Here, now, this is not a hurdle to be jumped over, not just a block of time I have to get through before going on to something else. This is an experience to be opened up and enjoyed or, if not enjoyed, at least noticed.” Of course, I was in college, so that didn’t last very long. I hadn’t really thought about it much until last night, when I hung the laundry up on the drying rack.

The laundry here, as I mentioned, takes two hours to wash and a couple of days to dry, once it’s hung. We don’t have a car, so we walk the 30+ minutes to campus, then back when we’re finished. Food doesn’t last as long, so people go shopping every couple of days, again, usually on foot. If you’re not cooking, you’re ordering from a restaurant, which takes just as long, sometimes longer, because the restaurant staff isn’t in a rush either.

I think the reason that we Americans tend to be the way we are is because we can have everything so fast, so it makes us move faster, simply because there’s nothing to wait for. In the states, it seems ludicrous to lengthen processes that could much more easily be shortened. Why hang laundry on the line when there’s a dryer in the basement? Why bake bread when you can buy it at the store? Why walk to work when you can drive there? It just seems like bad sense. I try my best to fight it, but it does. Foolishness. You could get an extra job with all that extra time, or earn another degree. In the states, I struggle to slow down, to take notice of things. But here, so far, life has just sort of slunk along and done it for me. Outside the early whisper of fall in the crispy leaves, the sad, chilled-earth smell. The rain outside our window which sounds, I swear, like someone is pushing a broken shopping cart across the cobblestone. And inside Scott’s black socks, my blue, the sea-green towels, the brightly patterned shirts, all folded so carefully and slowly drying over the heavy lines of wire.