You guys. I just saw it so clearly it took my breath away. The pattern is, there is no pattern. Walk with me here for a sec:

We’ve got a holiday today, so I’m on an extra-leisurely coffeewalk. Thinking about the sine wave hum of anxiety that backgrounds my existence, and how it’s based in eternally triaging my to-do list of everything from “water the plants” to “dismantle white supremacy.” My problem isn’t FOMO, it’s FOCS — Fear of Constant Should. If I’m doing A, should I be doing B instead? Maybe if I do B first, then C, and THEN I do A, that would be better? But should I start with Z because it’s more important, and then go back to A later if I can get everything else done quickly enough to leave time? What’s the One Right Solution? I’m supposed to be so smart, shouldn’t I be able to put these things together so they all fit perfectly like they’re Supposed To? It’s constant, oh my lord, the pressure to find the best possible pattern, the judging of how I’m fitting in every piece.

And suddenly WHOOSH, I’m six, seven, eightish and on dusty hands and knees in the gravel parking lot of the beach cottages where we stay for a couple weeks every summer. Not just any gravel. It’s got these big irregular broken-up pieces of slate in it, each one roughly the size of my little palm. For a few years, I’m fascinated off and on by the idea that if I just searched hard enough, I could somehow assemble them all back into place so the parking lot is a smooth mosaic. Like a jigsaw puzzle that I’ve solved perfectly.

Small Me often tries for a little while, piling up slate fragments and trying to build coherent patterns, but there are so many other things to do at the beach and I always get distracted, wander off to play in the tide pools or throw a Frisbee with my sister or build a sand castle and watch it get eaten by the returning waves.

As I should, because those are all valid choices, and Big Me looking back knows the same thing that you know reading this: there just wasn’t any perfect way to put the pieces together.

Those sheets of slate were chunked, pulverized, trucked, and dumped all over Cape Cod and who knows where else. Vacationing families have been driving their lawnchair-laden cars over them for years, grinding edges into the dust that Small Me runs to wash off in the waves.

The whole premise is flawed. Then and now. Small Me, Big Me. There is no “perfect” puzzle pattern.

There is only MY pattern. The pattern that I create by choosing my particular chunks out of the heaps of possible pieces.

The pattern is, there is no pattern.

Hope I can remember. Hope you can too, my fellow perfectionist friends of whom I have so many. Sending love and understanding to all of us.