I Pray to God to Never Give Me a Perfect Life

I just watched Main Vapas Aunga, a film set against the backdrop of the Partition of India and Pakistan.

It is a story of people who lost almost everything.

They left behind homes they had known all their lives. They lost loved ones to the beasts of communal hatred. They lived in refugee camps. They started businesses from nothing, built new homes, raised children, and created new lives in unfamiliar places.

And yet, beneath all that rebuilding, there remained a yearning.

A yearning to go back.

Back to the home they had left behind. Back to the people they had lost. Back to a world that once felt familiar, safe and complete.

What struck me most was that many of these people seemed to move on with their lives, but never quite moved past the idea of the life they had lost.

The protagonist, Keenu, carries this yearning to his final days. He wants to return to Sargodha, now in Pakistan, to meet his teenage-time sweetheart before he dies.

And as I watched him, I found myself crying.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, another voice was asking:

Why can't he just move on?

She had married someone else. He had married too. He had children. Life had happened. Why couldn't he accept that the past was the past and love the life that remained?

Perhaps that is the rational mind speaking.

But the yearning mind doesn't work that way.

The yearning mind

This reminded me of another story about yearning: Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Miss Saeki loses the love of her youth and spends much of her life holding on to that memory. She becomes so consumed by that lost world that she eventually opens the entrance stone to a kind of purgatory—a place where the boundaries between memory, desire and reality begin to dissolve.

She too chooses, in some sense, to remain with the perfect memory rather than fully inhabit the imperfect life that came after it.

To a rational mind, this sounds absurd.

Why sacrifice the present for something that no longer exists?

Why abandon a husband and son to preserve a memory?

Why spend an entire lifetime longing for someone when there is still a life to be lived?

But perhaps that is the mistake of the rational mind.

We look at yearning from the outside.

We see the irrationality of it, but not the experience of being consumed by it.

Who knows what goes on inside a yearning mind?

Perhaps when you have experienced something that feels perfect, losing it doesn't merely mean losing a person or a place. You lose an entire version of reality.

And perhaps that is why I began thinking about something that sounds almost paradoxical:

Maybe a perfect life is a curse.

The curse of perfection

We usually pray for the perfect life.

The perfect childhood.

The perfect body.

The perfect career.

The perfect marriage.

The perfect family.

The perfect home.

And once we have experienced something that feels perfect, we naturally want it to remain that way.

Forever.

But nothing does.

Youth disappears.

People die.

Children grow up.

Relationships change.

Bodies age.

Careers evolve.

Homes are left behind.

Even we are not the same people we were a few years ago.

The tragedy isn't that these things change.

The tragedy may be that we sometimes spend the rest of our lives trying to return to a version of life that no longer exists.

A person who had a perfect youth might spend adulthood trying to preserve it.

Someone who had a beautiful childhood might spend their life living in its nostalgia.

Someone who experiences a perfect marriage might find the death of their partner unbearable—not simply because they lost a person, but because they lost the world that existed with that person.

And perhaps that is what I saw in Keenu.

He wasn't simply yearning for a woman.

He was yearning for a world.

A world in which he was young, his home was intact, his sweetheart was waiting for him, and everything still seemed possible.

But that world had ended.

And no amount of yearning could bring it back.

Perhaps imperfection is a gift

This made me look at my own life differently.

I don't think I want a perfect life anymore.

I want a life that requires something from me.

I want to work for my fitness instead of being handed a perfect body.

I want to put effort into my career instead of arriving at some imaginary point where I have nothing left to prove or learn.

I want to work on my relationships instead of expecting people to always understand me perfectly.

I want to struggle, fail, learn, improve and occasionally begin again.

Because perhaps the opposite of a perfect life isn't a miserable life.

Perhaps it is a living life.

A life where things are constantly moving.

Where today's version of me doesn't have to be preserved forever.

Where I can lose something without believing that my best days are behind me.

Where I can appreciate something deeply without demanding that it last forever.

Where I can love people while knowing that I cannot keep them forever.

Where I can enjoy a beautiful moment without turning it into a prison of nostalgia.

There is something strangely liberating about accepting that nothing is permanent.

The world changes.

People change.

We change.

And if we want to remain part of life, perhaps we have to change with it.

So I don't want God to give me a perfect life.

I pray for an imperfect one.

Give me something to work for.

Give me something to learn.

Give me people to love and the wisdom to accept that they will change.

Give me failures that force me to grow.

Give me discomfort that teaches me resilience.

Give me beginnings and endings.

Give me enough beauty to make me grateful, but not so much perfection that I become afraid of losing it.

Because I don't want to spend my life standing at the entrance of a perfect past, begging it to let me back in.

I would rather keep walking.

Even when the road is difficult.

Even when the destination is uncertain.

Even when the life ahead looks nothing like the life I once imagined.

I would rather have an imperfect life that keeps moving than a perfect life that I spend forever trying to preserve.