I’ve had a bit of a cold this past week, it’s made me slow down. Which on one hand has sucked because I’m used to cramming everything into my life at a breakneck speed and then seeing if I have space for anymore, and on the other hand it is good because it has made me slow down. Maybe it’s the ‘Universes’ way of telling me to chill the hell out… Or maybe I just a have a cold (like a large portion of the community at this time of year as the days are shorter and the air is slightly crisper).

One morning this week on my way to feed our squabble of ducks I noticed that a tiny spider had woven itself an absolutely perfect web. The intricacies of this web were incredible. The fine silk touched itself at the exact point it needed to in order to craft a beautifully symmetrical and mathematically ingenious octagon. Each section of the web was the correct distance from the next section and as it glistened in the morning dew I wondered if the spider knew what an amazing work of art he/she had created?

What if, though the spider had our very human trait of thinking that his/her web had faults? Maybe he/she thought that the silk was too thin, that the evenness of the lines actually didn’t allow for the best capture of a variety of sized insects that it might devour for lunch and that it might not work. Maybe the location was all wrong and it longed to have spun its web in the tree on the other side of the fence.

Humans do this, we create something, whatever it is, we spend our time thinking about it, then actioning the task and then we find fault in what we have done instead of looking at it, and considering it absolutely perfect. We also, always think that the grass is greener on the other side.

In my eyes, this web was truly beautiful, pleasing to the eye, functional and in a great location ready to catch any poor unsuspecting flying insect into its grasp. But I was looking at it with my eyes and from afar. The spider would have had to get up and walk away, climb a tree and then look at his/her masterpiece to have the same perspective as me (mostly because, I’m human and I’m a lot taller than this eight-legged arachnid.)

What this illustrated perfectly to me was that, even though I thought that this web was perfect, the spider (the creator) may have disagreed with me. It taught me that there is no such thing as perfect, only perfect from your own perspective. We all have our own version of “perfection”.

So ease up on yourself and others, perfection is unobtainable as a collective thought. Be happy if you have created something you are proud of because to me – that as perfect as it’s going to get, and if it doesn’t look perfect to you, consider that it may look perfect to the person next to you – who has a completely different perspective to you.

Time to locate a cup of tea and some cold n’ flu tabs and solider on, I’ve got some perfection to create…