The (Book)Case for Perfection

literary flow state

I spent an hour and a half organizing my bookshelf earlier this week. It’s been one of those uninspiring to-do list items since moving into the new apartment. When I first started unpacking I just threw all my books up there in a storm of chaos so as to make room on the floor for all my other non-book storms of chaos. Those books and a few select plants sat on that bookshelf for the better part of two weeks. Collecting dust and just existing in a state of not-yet-done. That was until I needed to procrastinate on something else (writing) the other day. So I sat on the floor and began imagining what the perfect bookshelf might look like.

My entire mission was aesthetic appeal. I wanted the books to be orderly but arranged in a charming way that also allowed for a few photographs, plants, and candles. For years I’ve organized my books by size. Some people do color but I don’t ultimately have the patience for that. Besides that feels a little too uniform even for me. One by one I began taking books down and putting them back up the right way. Where should my yearbooks go? Will this friendship plant get better light on the third shelf or fourth? How do I make some stacks vertical and some horizontal?

As the minutes ticked by I drifted into a flow state. My hands were involuntarily moving about putting groups of books from one side to the other. My brain was alive yet quiet. Focused, but gently. Nearby my speaker pumped out relaxing indie coffeehouse music and Birdie’s light whiffle of a snore filled my ears. Obviously the cookbooks needed to go together but what about everything else? It made sense to put my plays and acting books on the same shelf. What about all these novels? Should I separate fiction from nonfiction? I decided the rest can live in a state of thematic disarray. After all, life doesn’t does roll out in dewey decimal format. The finishing touch was installing LED puck lights underneath the shelves.

Magnificence.

90 minutes later and I stepped back to admire the finished product. What was that feeling? Pride? The faintest wonderment? Maybe simple joy? Every single inch of that 7-foot-tall Ikea Jättesta shelf was perfect. Perfect to me. My books, some of my most beloved possessions, have a home that’s representative of how I feel about them. They’re objects of beauty and richness, stories that teach us and make us human. Most of them I’ve read. Because of that, by way of some mystical process, they are a part of me. The ones I haven’t read yet symbolize possibility and untapped potential. Sure not every book up there is a great read (Atlas Shrugged is on display after all) but every book has something to say. It gets a seat at the table.

For much of my life my mantra is “good enough.” I really stand by it. I believe in the power of “good enough.” We artists especially tend to let perfection, that nebulous and opaque destination, be a barrier to our art. We build great walls of perfection around our ideas and our craft that we ourselves then struggle to climb over. For practicality’s sake, imperfectly done will always trump perfectly not-done. So I say lower the bar because good enough is good enough.

But after 90 minutes of striving for bookshelf perfection, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a place for that amorphous construct after all. It felt good, like really good, to design that space to my liking. It exists in intentionality now. It was empowering to claim total ownership over those empty Jättesta shelves. Each one a blank canvas. Instead of allowing my apathy or excuses to lead the way, I handed the reigns over to perfection and said “let’s do it.” It was, dare I say, fun and incredibly satisfying. At one point, for no explicable reason, I switched two shelves completely. They were correct individually but incorrect as a whole. So I went through the effort to make them the same but flip-flopped. Now, as I write this very sentence, I get to look at something beautiful and organized, something whose sight releases happy chemicals in my brain. I’m glad I danced with perfection. It reminded me that sometimes striving for perfect is okay. For whatever I land on at the end of that dance, it’ll be damn close to perfect. And damn close to perfect is good enough.