Stories of Kindness from Around the World

I was on vacation recently in Palm Desert, California, visiting an outdoor craft fair on a Saturday morning. Although it was early, the desert heat had set in, and the day was untypically humid. Moisture-bearing clouds had been pushed over the desert by a hurricane approaching the southern coast of Texas. While the others shopped, I grabbed an icy drink and took my refuge at a picnic table under a tent where a middle-aged Carribean man was playing guitar.

As his song ended, he acknowledged me, at that point his only audience member. "How 'bout da weather?" he nodded.

"It's beautiful," I responded, quick to add, "I love the heat, but I came all this way across the country to get away from the humidity, and now the desert has this! What's this all about?"

He shook his head. "Everybody wanting perfect'," he said, and with a wave of his hand he brushed my unworthy comment out of the air around him. "Is no perfect. Is what is. Perfect enough." 

I didn't respond but cocked my head to the side. I was weighing his words. They felt heavy and wise. It must have appeared that I disagreed or didn't understand. So he attempted to explain further.

"Good sun. Could be nice, but garden want rain."      

"Nice rain. Could be good, but somebody want golf."

"Too hot, want breeze. Too cold, want sun."

"No matter what is, somebody want to change to make perfect to them. But perfect to them not perfect to somebody else."

I began to nod and smile. He was right. We can't seem to resist the temptation to tweak everything, find the flaw, nitpick away at the tiny imperfections of whatever distraction might be making our experience less than it could have been. Not quite perfect. Are we no longer able to embrace and enjoy perfect when we have it, which is really every day of our lives?

"This," he said with a sweeping hand gesture around the thick, muggy air, around the blistering hot benches on asphalt, around the tent-shaded stage he had been given, around the God-given beauty of the California desert, around the country he had been able to enter and play his crisp, lilting native music for a stranger, "all this ... perfect enough!"

He was so very right -- about his little corner of the world and about my life. And he had given me a priceless souvenir -- the gift of being able to see that my life, indeed, is "perfect enough."