Impatience With Imperfection

Sometimes when we see what others have done, we wonder why they didn’t do better. We often wonder why past generations didn’t do things differently. When some new improvement comes along, we wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner.

We look back at early inventions and compare them with present-day products and wonder why they weren’t made better to begin with. And when we travel old roads that wander a long way around, we may wonder why the men who made them didn’t make them straighter.

But we must remember that most things have humble beginnings. Neither men nor methods, nor ideal nor edifices are born full grown. Improvement in people or in processes rarely comes all at once. And anyone who thinks he can quickly remake men or quickly move the world is due for disappointment.

We have to take men as they are and help them to move on from where they are. We have to let children learn. Sometimes we have to let them fumble with knots that we could easily tie and untie for them in much less time. But our doing it for them wouldn’t be like letting them learn for themselves. It is easy enough to say, “Why don’t they do it better?” But progress is a relatively slow process. And perhaps it is just as well that it is. There may be dangers in a too rapid rate of change.

Perhaps from our perspective almost all of us could live other people’s lives better for them than they live their own lives. From our perspective perhaps it would seem that almost every generation could have solved their problems better than they did. But before we ask why others haven’t done better, we shouldn’t forget that we ourselves haven’t yet abandoned all our errors.

And whenever we expect perfection in the present or in the past, in friends or in strangers, in our own children or in other people’s children⎯or even in ourselves⎯we must remember that progress is an eternal process and that perfection is an ideal as yet unattainable among men.

Surely we must reach for perfection; but surely also we should not be too impatient when we fail to find it in others⎯even as we hope that others will not be too impatient when they fail to find perfection in us.