…[I]f you listen carefully, you get to hear everything you didn’t get to hear in the first place. —Sholom Aleichem—
What are those things that we don’t want to hear? Mainly, we don’t want to hear disagreement from people who are important to us. We don’t want to hear that
are children are making choices that we wouldn’t make; we don’t want to hear that our partner believes that we are anything but perfect; we don’t want to hear that our friend, our parent, our teacher, our boss, see anything in us to criticize.
Poor us! We know we aren’t perfect, but we can’t tolerate hearing it from someone else. Why should that be? We know other people aren’t perfect, either. Where did we get the idea that we we’re supposed to be error-free?
To accept our own imperfection is to make a giant step toward peace of mind. To accept that the world is full of people who disagree with us—some of whom even love us very much—is to begin to achieve maturity. Perhaps we think, or used to think, that we would be happy when we rubbed out our last traces of imperfection. That is not happiness, that is to become marble—hard, cold, and breakable.
True spiritual progress begins with my acceptance of my imperfections.