Discovering Life is Like Drawing a Bicycle

I am taking Beginning Drawing class at the Lawrence Arts Center. Not because I want to learn how to draw, or because it is a course requirement… but because I want to experience imperfection and be able to live in it. Sounds crazy? Read on and you may think I am nuts (or make some sense).

Ever since I remembered, my parents (especially my mom) have always ended every frustrating story about another person’s incompetence with, “Oh well, what can you do. We’re perfectionists” or “Sometimes the best thing to do is to do it yourself “. Have someone ever told you this, or maybe you have found your self telling yourself this wonderful gem?

Welcome to Perfectionists Anonymous. My name is Brian.

Welcome Brian.

There are many undetected signs of my perfectionism throughout life. There was the moment when I stopped becoming friends with someone in middle school because he doesn’t do his homework, or broke the rules. Or what about that time when I had an argument with my roommate because I wanted to sleep early so I can get my perfect 8 hours of sleep and he wanted to have a party with his friends (in the living room). Or when I would break up a business partnership because I wanted to stay true to the rules of the programming that was given to me.

I used to call myself an idealist. Now I realized that I was just a blind perfectionist. I didn’t really pursue excellence, I just wanted it to be perfect… according to me.

Doing this have caused me relationships. Because perfection does not consider the basic human condition.

Mistakes.

Humans make mistakes.

All. The. Time.

To be imperfect means, you allow yourself and others to make mistakes. Big or small, right or wrong, ethical or non ethical whatever you judge a mistake, it is human. Being human requires you to be and allow imperfection.

Now back to the drawing board.

If you have ever drawn anything, you would know that your best friend is… the eraser. You use it because you make mistakes, but you also use it because you want to make it better. More accurate, more realistic, more straight.

What I have learned about drawing is that making mistakes is a requirement. In order for you to make a drawing that represents what you see, you will make mistakes. And you must allow yourself to make it. By being brave enough to make the mistakes, you will find a new perspective to make it better.

The other thing that I realized on my 2nd drawing class was that in order to create a drawing that is true to what your eye sees, you must be willing to go for it. What i mean is, if you see a line or a curve or a shadow and you do not know how to draw it, you must first try to draw it. It seems obvious, but if you are a perfectionist, you would be afraid to make a mistake. So you would be paralyzed staring at the drawing, trying to figure out how to draw the next thing because you don’t trust that it will become something. What I’ve realized is that as soon as you start drawing that impossible part of the picture that you cannot figure out, is the moment that you figure out how to draw it.

This is very much like life and the pursuant of goals. Most of us are afraid to get started because we don’t know if it will work, or if it will be what we expected. So we get stuck looking at the drawing board by telling ourselves “someday “ because we are afraid to make the first stroke.

And on to the bike.

The bike was the most difficult thing I’ve had to draw in this class. It so difficult that after 1.5 hours, all I had on my paper was the front frame of the bike. Which was basically 4 slanted vertical lines. If you saw it, you would have thought that I didn’t even tried. But in truth, I have made 4 different bikes.

The first bike was a miniature bike too small for the floor, the second one was a bike with giant wheels, the third bike had a jello frame and the fourth one had truck wheels for the rear. All was erased, and drawn and erased and drawn.

This bike was difficult to draw because of one important thing that our teacher taught me.

The first thing about drawing this bike is to not see it as a bike.

It is a bunch of lines that meets each other with sharp edges. He tells me that as soon as I tried to draw wheels as a circle and saddle as a curve and the bike as a bike, our mind automatically takes over to draw something that we imagine it to be. A bike in our own mind. Not the actual bike in front of us.

This teaching and experience I have found to be very insightful. Mainly because it is true. We want life to be what we have in our mind. We want this thing to happen first and then the next in order for us to achieve this success or this goal that we want for ourselves. We want to draw our life to be like the bicycle that we have in our minds.

But in truth, this life that we have in front of us is nothing like what is in our mind. The life we have, the life we received and the life we get to live, is something that we tend to forget.

Success only happens when we can make the best out of our own lives.

And the best way to approach it is to draw it one line and one sharp edge at a time.