When I turned 42 in 2021, I declared it my Jackie Robinson year (his Brooklyn Dodgers’ jersey number was 42). Like Jackie, the first Black player in baseball’s major leagues, I’d be braver and more courageous and speak up more. Last year I turned 43 and decided this weird prime number year would be my imperfect year. I am a perfectionist by nature. Rather than try to smooth out or hide my imperfections, this is my year to embrace them. An imperfect offering, to quote the song lyrics above, is better than no offering, and may even be just as good as a perfect offering. I hear Leonard Cohen implying that there is no such thing as a perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything.
Last year it felt like a breaking open in me when a friend/colleague shared her truth that all systems are broken. I could readily agree that some systems are broken; there are some with which I have extensive experience and can authoritatively say they are broken. But ALL systems? Everything? My perfectionistic self struggles to reconcile that an imperfect system would be created in the first place. Why would you design something that is flawed?
My husband and his close friends love to play involved, strategy board games, and they’ve gamed together for years. Part of their play is to experiment with different strategies to see how the game responds. What happens if you play the Witch card over and over in Dominion? Playing as the Tharsis Republic in Terraforming Mars can be like playing the game in easy mode. One time a friend played within the rules of Galaxy Trucker but used a feature more often than the game designer expected, which made the game ridiculously easy for him to win and he declared the game broken. Game testers are supposed to find all these flaws, but they don’t always catch all of them. The system is not perfect.
The good news is that the brokenness is how the light gets in. There’s a reason we call it the crack of dawn when the sunlight breaks over the horizon. A seed has to break open in order to grow into a plant. An old idea has to break open in order to have an epiphany. And that brokenness is okay. There’s a crack in everything, anyway. That’s reality and seeing things as they really are: imperfect, flawed, broken. It’s also how the light gets in.