by Ivan Hoffman

"So when does life get perfect!?," she demanded. "When do we stop 'getting there' and simply be there?"
"It's perfect at each moment," he said.

"That's too glib, too facile, too, well it's too damn perfect," she said, raising her voice a touch. "It's really no answer to say that it's perfect at each moment when I don't feel it's perfect."

"What's not perfect about your life?," he asked. "You seem to have enormous blessings. Of course, it would also be perfect if you didn't but you do."

"What's not perfect? Everything's not perfect!," she replied. "When does love not leave? In fact, let me ask this: when do we find love in the first place? Why does every love experience seem like it's about learning to love better the next time? When the hell do we love now!? Not next time! Now!"

"We're always loving now," he replied. "Even though it may look like it's practice for the next time, it's loving now."

"It's like sometimes we have love and then the next moment, it's gone," she replied. "We seem to have these long periods of uninterrupted no love followed by sporadic periods of love. And even when we have love, we're just sort of waiting until we have no love again and sure enough...."

"Oh! give me a break," he said. "I know you've had, you have, plenty of love in your life, right now. It's just you aren't satisfied with what you've got."

"Listen!," she said, "if I don't feel love then maybe there's no love. At least not love in the fashion I want it. When does love become so deep, so secure, so...so Godlike, that it satisfies us down to the depths of our soul? When do we get to the point where we don't have to hold back in love because we're afraid our lover's going to leave? When does that happen?, tell me."

"Maybe it never does," he answered. "Maybe love isn't intended to be permanent, eternal. Maybe love's perfect because it's imperfect. I mean, maybe it's not supposed to be so secure that we forget that we need to love. If it were that secure, we might take it for granted. Maybe the kind of love you're seeking is not the kind of love God has in mind but only the movies have in mind."

"I refuse to believe that!," she said. "If I have a deep longing for it then it must be available. If I feel that love's imperfect then, at least according to me, it is imperfect. Maybe there's no objective concept called love anyway. Maybe it's just what we all have made up in our minds. But the bottom line is that if we are unsatisfied in love, then almost by definition it must mean that love's imperfect."

He looked at her eyes and they appeared to be getting quite moist. He took her hand and she squeezed his.

She went on. "So when I'm with someone, like when I was married, it was great most of the time but even then, I kept thinking there must be more. And then when I'm not with someone, like after I was no longer married, I kept thinking there must be more. Kept recalling the times before when I was really happy, if only for moments at a time. It's like first I seem to have it all and then I lose it. It's all so transitory, like we're not really supposed to get too comfortable with anything."

"Maybe we're not. And besides, you didn't lose anything," he said. "It just changed. What you had became what you have and what you have will become what you had and that will become what you have later. In other words, it's all a continuum. And so maybe we're supposed to simply enjoy what we have when we have it instead of continuously looking for something else."

"I refuse to believe that either!," she said. "If God has given me this divine discontent, you know that gnawing in my heart that tells me there's a great deal more about life that I'm not experiencing, then I refuse to believe that God wants me to be content with what I have. If that were so, God would make me content. But I'm constantly believing that there's much, much more. More in terms not only of love, but of connections with people, with changing the world, with not having people disappoint me because they're untrue to their word. Life's imperfect in so many ways and I refuse to accept that we have to accept that."

"What would 'perfect' look like?," he asked. "Would you know it if you saw it?"

"It would look like, well it would be perfect," she answered. "We would love continuously, eternally, without fear. We would never be frustrated in anything, love, work, anything. We would lose that sense that there's something more, something we don't have. Perfect for me would be a day where I felt a deep connection to God; a day where I had nothing but love in my life. Perfect for me would be a day where, no matter how many stores I went to, I always had the right amount of pennies!"

"But wouldn't perfect, the way you describe it, be boring?," he asked.

"Not at all!," she quickly responded. "What's the advantage of continually searching? When does the damn search end? When do we get to enjoy the fruits of our hard labor?"

"Maybe I can explain it this way," he offered. "I know you play tennis so you must be familiar with the term 'sweet spot.' The sweet spot on a tennis racket or baseball bat is the exact place where, if you connect with either the tennis ball or baseball in that place, you have no sensation of having hit the ball. There is no jarring in your wrist or hands, no resistance. The swing is effortless and you achieve maximum effectiveness with it. It is almost as though you have not hit the ball at all. You are, at that exact moment, one with the ball; there is no separation between you and the ball. If you run or bicycle there is a similar feeling you get when you become one with the motion of your sport; all panting and tiredness disappear and there is only the sensation of your own body moving in harmony with itself. You lose the dualistic separation between you and the 'outside' world and blend in to that world. You become one with the world."

"Therefore?," she said, sarcastically.

"Therefore," he said, "life is perfect when you're at your sweet spot. And you can get to that sweet spot by letting go of your expectations that there is something more, something you're missing. When you see life as only a moment by moment experience, then you're at the sweet spot. It's like you're connecting to God at that moment."

"Have you ever experienced that sweet spot?," she asked.

"Yes, I have," he replied. "The first time, it was years ago, it was very scary at first because it was all new. It was like my inner voice, my watcher, was turned off and I simply 'was'. I had nothing beyond that exact moment in which I 'was'. But like I say, it was very scary because I had never experienced anything like it. Then, after a few moments of being scared, it became, well it became exhilarating, exciting. It was like I was outside of my life. And when it was over, it only lasted a couple of minutes, I realized that I had been touched by God. I knew it was the purpose of life to get to that place all the time."

"But when you talk about having no expectations," she interjected, "you're back to being glib. We're human so we have to have expectations. Besides, you also ignore that very present feeling in my heart, that divine discontent, that tells me to keep searching."

"Look at it this way," he said. "When you have expectations, what you are really doing is limiting yourself, your life. You're doing so because you are always on the lookout for the fulfillment of those expectations instead of being open to everything. It's like you keep your options limited because you reject anything that doesn't fit into the expectations you have."

"But we can't not have expectations," she said. "It's too idealistic to think we can."

"Okay," he said. "Let's say we all have them, which we probably do. But the fault is not in having expectations, but in allowing them to limit our being open to everything else. Having expectations is okay as long as you are willing to drop them in an instant if the universe has something else in mind for you."

"How does this apply to our lives becoming perfect?," she asked.

"How it applies is like this," he replied. "Expectations define and so limit us. They keep us from experiencing the perfection of the moment. So we're always in the process of becoming perfect. It may very well be that it is the process, you know, the becoming itself, that is perfection. Maybe we are only given glimpses of our sweet spots for these short periods of time you were speaking about, just to sort of let us know that it's there. But not every ring can be the brass one or else what would be the value to that one when we got it?"

"That sounds like some Taoist or Zen sort of idea," she answered. "One of those ideas that turns in on itself."

"Well, maybe it is," he replied. "But that doesn't mean it may not be true. In other words, it is the very act of striving that is the purpose of life. We may never actually get to that place of total perfection but even if we don't, we have to keep trying to reach it. It's like the only way that perfection can actually define itself in our lives, you know, have any meaning or value to us, is because it's not always perfect."

"Maybe there's nothing perfect about life anyway," she said. "Maybe it's all a myth that it gets perfect at some time."

"No! I refuse to believe that!," he exclaimed.