
Newsletter 1 – January 1, 2019
Embracing Imperfection for the New Year
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen from Anthem
Welcome, dear reader, to this very first newsletter from Project Radiance!
New Year’s Day holds the temptation of perfection.
It’s the blank journal that has not been written in, the resolutions unbroken,
the promise that, this year, we will be perfect and be made perfect.
Perfection comes from the Latin perficere – to complete, to finish.
That sense of finishing is the very opposite of what it means to be alive.
We are unfinished beings, in process, imperfect.
This is the joyous, messiness of life – the vibrancy of the imperfect!
And what a gift it is to be our glorious imperfect selves in front of other humans.
To embrace imperfection is to open ourselves up to the recognition that we will make mistakes,
that we will be disappointed and disappoint. And yet, embedded in that acknowledgment,
is the possibility of forgiveness and compassion for ourselves and for others.
Perfection is sterile. It has no need to forgive, to grow, to love or to be loved.
To embrace our imperfection is to embrace our capacity to love and be loved. It is to accept that our radiance, our joy, and our connection with the world come from our vibrant, growing, messy selves.
Perhaps the only resolution we need to make is to let ourselves be present in our state of aliveness, embracing our imperfection as an act of love.
Happy New Year!
Emily