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We went over and over our holiday letter, at least six maybe seven times. Ours tries to be funny (readers over the years have said we are), to have the words be more like captions for ridiculous photos we’ve taken over the year rather than a laundry list of additions to our curricula vitae. And since our kids are all grown and gainfully employed members of Generation X, we don’t have any at-home gifted prodigies to crow about.
Even with a light-hearted letter, when I put on my editorial hat it’s hard for me not to slip into a junior case of obsessive/compulsive disorder as I comb through the text trying to root out every mistake. After all of our paring back to omit needless words (thank you, Strunk and White!), I was sure we’d gotten it right this year, what with our last-minute rearranging of misplaced clauses, reclaiming words gone MIA on the right-hand margin (MS Word voodoo), even tediously adding back in missing spaces where words ran into one another as if they were determined to shape-shift into new, not necessarily improved compounds. That sort of thing.
Then last night, as I folded another hot-off-the-copier copy to slip into a card, I saw it. The mistake—the glaringly wrong verb tense in the phrase: “LeBron James whom she’d meet a few years before.”
First off, there is absolutely nothing grammatically wrong with the actual construction of this phrase, whom she’d meet—if the rest of the sentence required the conditional simple tense to talk about an event in the future—whom she would meet. Except my sentence is talking about something that occurred in the past, my 2003 accidental encounter with the NBA star one afternoon when he was shopping for a McMansion in my cousin-by-marriage’s upscale Akron, Ohio neighborhood. Which means the sentence should read whom she’d met—that’s the past perfect simple tense, for all of you grammar nerds out there. Of course, I immediately started to make corrections on the remaining copies of the letter, stopping my editorially neurotic self short of unfolding all the already-folded ones to change the offending “meet” to “met.”
Seeking a standard of perfection in our writing, in editing, in the words we put out into the world—isn’t that asking a little too much from our imperfect, messy, typo-generating, fallible selves? One of the most important teachings of Buddhism is the Ten Pāramitās. Pāramitā is a Sanskrit word meaning perfect or perfection; the Pāramitās instruct us in the realization of certain virtues or values. Scholars think the Pāramitās were added to the Buddhist canon early on to help popularize the nascent religion. These Ten Perfections embrace many virtues recognizable to us today—generosity, morality and right conduct, insight and wisdom, diligence and effort, patience and tolerance, honesty, and determination. And a few that I think have less currency (and thus less emphasis) in Western belief systems and thought—renunciation, loving-kindness, serenity and equanimity.
All of this fretting about one wrong word got me to thinking about the idea of imperfection, and what philosophical, existential, and spiritual values embracing imperfection as a concept might actually have. The Buddha taught that the true nature of this world we inhabit is, indeed, exactly that: imperfection. He even had another list of the more imperfect states of being such as anxiety, lethargy, too-strong longing, and fright. Time and again, in his teachings, we are urged to seek then accept and live with the “perfection of imperfection.”
I’m not talking about giving up standards or style guides or forsaking the monthly Q&A on the Chicago Manual of Style’s web site. Rather, I’m suggesting that maybe, instead of striving for the perfectly proofread manuscript, that there just might be imperfections every editor should embrace, should learn to live with for the lessons in humility and surrender they might give us.
The occasional typo—as long as it isn’t too egregious—“pubic” instead of “public” comes to mind as something that would definitely be a no-no (and was actually on a memo sent university-wide by one of my staff members in my past life—Bummer, man, to quote the Dude in The Big Lebowski.) The incorrect placement of punctuation inside or outside a closing parenthesis. Hell, I may have gotten that one wrong in the previous sentence. The serial comma rule or no? Does anyone really keep track? How about book titles in italics or underlined? And what about the proper use of a semicolon as opposed to the em dash? Does mixing them up really matter in the grand scheme of things?
Sometimes the flaw that might ruin something, that might be seen as sullying a text, a moment, the crystal on a necklace, the pull in a favorite sweater can become, in the right context, a proud, defining feature, maybe even the treasure or the prize. During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, every bakery window is filled with crazy-looking rings of twisted bread garishly frosted in the purple, green, and gold colors of Carnival, what the locals call a “king cake.” According to Wikipedia, “the cakes have a small trinket (often a small plastic baby said to represent Baby Jesus) inside, and the person who gets the piece of cake with the trinket has various privileges and obligations.” These days it’s more likely the trinket is a bean. The person who gets the slice that contains the bean gets to be king or queen for the day and wear a crown—no sense of failure or imperfection there!
The verb tense error in our holiday letter is my hidden bean, my Baby Jesus, my bowing down to the necessity of imperfection in the living of our necessarily imperfect lives. In fact, I’ve now begun to wonder—like in that children’s book, Where’s Waldo?—if any of our holiday card readers will even find my typo, let alone even care. Obviously, I’m the one who needs to take to heart the need for accepting—and regularly celebrating—the perfection of imperfection. So I’ll raise my holiday wassail to the virtues of meet staying meet. And let it stand. Stet.
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