Perfectly Imperfect

 Alignment, balance, proportion, harmony, call it what you will, it all has to do with a level of “rightness” that we, as humans, can somehow feel and recognize. One of my favorite examples of this is Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. Da Vinci basically used a now-famous drawing to show how the proportions of the human form have informed classical architecture for centuries and that the greatest buildings in history took their measurements from the size and scale of the human body. This would explain why we feel most comfortable in rooms that echo these perfect proportions. To me, it’s just our falling in line with nature and its love of alignment.

But make no mistake, alignment is NOT about perfection. Nature doesn’t demand perfection - it can’t, it has multiple extinctions on its resume. It doesn’t even always call for symmetry or sameness. What it does seem to need though is alignment. There’s something about the balance in nature that works and we’ve all seen what happens when it gets out of alignment, especially from our own interference.

Nothing is perfect. Not even nature because it comes from the perfect imperfection of our cosmos. But I do believe that nature in its essence, is fair. For every cosmic glitch, another solar system is born, for every extinction there is a rebirth, and for every hurricane, there are abundant rainbows, stunning displays of foliage, and picture perfect summer days. We don’t always keep score the way we should but there IS a lot of good to offset the bad. Because nature seems to recognize that you have to have both and that this is the secret to balance, and ultimately survival. And I find myself wishing that we could take nature’s message to heart and embrace the Vitruvian Man. The one who celebrates our own perfect imperfection and can still be the poster child for balance and proportion and harmony.