Losing My Keys and Imperfections

 Imperfection by Elizabeth Carlson 

I am falling in love with my imperfections

The way I never get the sink really clean,

forget to check my oil,

lose my car in parking lots,

miss appointments I have written down, or am just a little late.

I am learning to love, the small bumps on my face

the big bump of my nose, chipped nail polish, toes that overlap.

Learning to love the open-ended mystery of not knowing why

I am learning to fail to make lists, use my time wisely, read the books I should.

Instead I practice inconsistency,  irrationality, forgetfulness.

Probably I should hang my clothes neatly in the closet

all the shirts together, then the pants, send Christmas cards, or better yet

a letter telling of my perfect family.

But I'd rather waste time listening to the rain,

or lying underneath my cat learning to purr.

I used to fill every moment  with something I could cross off later.

Perfect was  the laundry done and folded all my papers graded

the whole truth and nothing but

Now the empty mind is what I seek the formless shape  the strange, off center,

sometimes fictional me.

It is Tuesday morning. I am dressed in gray slacks, a blue polo, and my black velcro sneakers. My lunch is packed, my bookbag is sorted, the dog has been walked, the cats have been fed and I am walking towards the front door to leave for work. The time is 7:12 am. 

I have a meeting scheduled for 8:30am with a few colleagues and so my timetable is pretty tightly scheduled. It takes me between 32-35 minutes to drive from my home to the parking lot at my place of employment, then it takes me four minutes to walk from my car to my office. It takes me five minutes to start the coffee, three minutes to login into my computer and another 5 minutes to login to the student database system where I do much of my work. I then need 6 minutes to walk from my office to the room we are meeting in. We also need to account for the possibility that I may need to use the restroom before my meeting and so…. Put all that together, I need to be in the car and on my way by 7:20 at the very latest. 

But as I said, it is 7:12 and all is well. I walk with confidence, ready to greet my day and walk to the small bowl on a small table by my front door that is where I put my wallet, my office keys, my phone and my car keys. When I arrive at the bowl however, my car keys are not where they are supposed to be, and the suddenly, the whole day shifts.

The time is now 7:13 

I stand for a moment, staring blankly at the bowl, unsure of how this could have possibly happened. I take another thirty seconds to think through where I could have possible put them. I then move quickly back to my bedroom, thinking that perhaps my keys are in the pockets of the pants I wore the day prior. When I don't find them there, I then look on my nightstand and in the laundry basket hoping it might be there, but to no avail. It is now 7:15. 

I walk back out of my bedroom, and growl at my dog who is suddenly very much underfoot and I am losing patience. I take a deep breath, and then look in my kitchen and then I walk out to the car to check to see if I left them there. I did not. It is now 7:17am. 

At this point, my day that was so full of hope and confidence has now totally collapsed. I am angry, frazzled and feeling incompetent. I stop and take another breath, and say a prayer in hopes that by invoking the Divine, an angel might magically appear with my keys. I don't limit myself to just one Divinity either. I invoke St. Jude, the Catholic saint of lost causes, and I pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Then I add Astaria, a Greek goddess and finally Kali, a Hindu Goddess who, while not known for finding keys, is known for destroying things and honestly, at this moment I am past the point of finding the keys and into the “I might as well just die,” phase. 

It is now 7:19am. 

I return to the bowl, where this horrible story just began, and stare again at the empty bowl, wondering who things got so off the rails, when, out the corner of my eye, I see that there on my desk, on top of a book I set out the night before to make sure that I would take it to work with me, sit my keys. It appears that Monday Night me thought that if I put my keys on the book, I would remember to grab my keys and my book. 

The time is now 7:21. 

I grab my keys and my book and run to my car, and begin my day. 

Now, I hope that this story was enjoyable for you to listen to, but I also assume that you probably have a story similar to this. In a space of eight minutes, my day went from feeling well-planned to chaotic and I went from being cool, calm and collected, to being chaotic, exasperated and stressed. While I wish it wasn’t the case, it is amazing how something as small as losing my keys can cause me to descend it to what seems like the end of the world. 

I am sure that many of us in this room have had this feeling of sort of a collapse of how we most like to think of ourselves. This emotional upheaval is not just caused by losing your keys of course, It can be set off by running late for an event, or forgetting to put something on the calendar or getting home from the grocery store and realizing you forgot to grab the one item you really needed in order to make dinner. Whatever it is that sets it off though, we all come to these moments when our imperfections rise to the top… so what are we supposed to do when this happens? 

Well… the first thing we might be tempted to do, which I would recommend not doing, is being in denial about it. It is easy for us to look at our not so best moments and want to sweep them under the rug. After all, while we might have moments of anger, frustration, or bitterness, it's not like we have killed anyone. And besides, no one is perfect and while we have our shortcomings, we also have our principles and values, we are smart, well read, generally capable, and decently looking bunch. Why should one little slip up bother us? 

While this is all easy to say, and generally easy to believe, denying we have areas we can grow and improve on, will keep us stagnant in our evolution towards being people of integrity and values. If we are going to improve, we must be honest about the things we need to improve on, even when they don’t feel great admitting it. 

In the same way that it’s important that we don’t go into denial however, its also really important we do allow ourselves to over dramatize, or fixate on our imperfections either. When I can look honestly at what actually sets me off when I lose my keys, the answer is not the act of losing my keys itself, but what I think it says about me as a person. 

I like to think that I am a well organized, calm, cool and collected individual who is more than capable of perfectly managing the many things that I have going on in my life, and something like losing my keys reminds me that that is not as true as I wish it was. Left to my own devices, I can then allow this hiccup in my day to create all sorts of negative self talk in which I can take myself from “I can’t believe I lost my keys and was almost late for work,” to “I am not able to do anything right and am I total failure and a joke. I am a disappointment to everyone and should just go back to bed and not get up again.” 

And that friends is overdramatizing, but if we are not careful, we can all do it. 

Another example of this is not too long ago, I was walking out of the HyVee on Locust and one of you who may be in this very room was walking towards the door that I was exiting from. Now, I want to be clear, it normally brings me so much joy to see you all out in the wild, but on this day, I had had a terrible day at work. 

I had been disorganized, I had made some mistakes on a report I had submitted, I had a headache and it was hot and I was sweaty and feeling gross and fat and I really just wanted to go home and as person walked towards me, instead of having feelings of joy, I was immediately thrown into a panic because this person was going to see me for the mess that I was in that moment and in the 25 seconds I had to process the situation, my inner voice went from “Oh it’s too bad you have a headache when you are about to see this person you care about,” to “you are so unprofessional looking right now, they are going to see you and think ill of you and then think ill of UUFD because UUFD must be full of incompetent people to let me be their minister and then they are never going to come back and tell everyone they know that you are the failure that you know you are!” 

Once again, overdramatizing a bit. 

I don’t actually remember what I said to the person, but whatever it was, it then haunted me my whole way home because however I had handled the situation, it wasn’t good enough. 

Now, realistically, the person I ran into probably didn’t think anything of the interaction we had and probably doesn’t remember it, but I do. 

This sort of raging self-dispersion, is not only really rather dangerous in its own unique way, it also presents the same issue that denial does, its dishonest. In the same way that denying we have imperfections is not being truthful to ourselves, neither is painting ourselves as worse, or less than we are. Until we are able to clearly see ourselves as we are, no growth is possible. 

So, we are not in denial, and we aren’t overstating either. Here we are, our imperfect, but very lovable and wonderful selves, what do we do? 

Well, my advice is to… come to church. Now church isn't the only place in which this is possible, but church is meant to be the ideal place for this sort of work because we do not gather here together as perfect people seeking to show others how perfect we are. We are meant to gather here as people on life’s journey looking for love, support and care as we strive to grow each day more and more into the people we wish to be. And while we are each imperfect in our own way, because of our different temperaments, spiritual journeys and life experiences, when we are able to be open with one another, we are also able to inspire and assist one another.

 You would be amazed at how often I ask myself “what would alyssa do?” when faced with a situation that I am feeling a lack of confidence around, or “how would Marian handle this?” When I am faced with a person I am frustrated by.  And each month when I balance my checkbook, I essentially pray to Jerry, hoping I will be gifted, if just for a moment with his talent for numbers. 

I would invite you to look around this room and see just how much wisdom, compassion and love is present in this place and see here not a people and a place that demands your perfection, but exists to help you on every step of your journey to your more whole and thriving self. 

As we go from this place then, I hope that we will have the courage to look at the moments of our days that reveal to us when and where we are not yet at our best, and have the fortitude to look at these parts of ourselves honestly, and with self-compassion. I hope that we will see in each other, friends and companions on this wild journey we call life and extend care to one another when we need it.