In fact, we all know: nothing is perfect in life. But when imperfection shows again, it’s still hard to live with it – isn’t it?

I’m on Mallorca at the moment. It won’t be long now until we move for good. But there are still last-minute jobs to be done. Craftsmen come and go… or we would like them to come and then they don’t, or alternatively: they come and the material they need is not available on the island. Nothing is quite perfect.

I’ll be honest, in moments like that I wish everything would go exactly as I thought it would. But we also know that this is far too optimistic! I know that nothing is perfect. Not me, not my life, not things and not even the craftsmen. 

A few days ago we zoomed in with friends who are in a similar situation right now. They’ve bought a house in France and while renovating they’ve discovered that they have to do a lot more than they originally thought. Just a few weeks ago, our friend was getting terribly upset about this. She even talked about cancelling the whole project. Now, when we chatted again, things suddenly looked very different. Our friend was calm and serene herself, even though – or perhaps because – the two of them had solved a lot more problems in the meantime. 

In the course of the conversation, she described to us how she had calmed down bit by bit. She said: “You have to work for the serenity first. But today, almost nothing upsets me.” We hardly recognised her and were deeply impressed. She told us about a kitchen builder for whom she had to wait for weeks: “I stayed totally relaxed because I somehow knew he would come. And so it was.” Her progress within a few weeks was impressive. 

Well, I have been playing this game with construction and craftsmen for a while now, and currently, while we are here, I have had to make some concessions to my ideas. But fortunately I find that every time I do, I also become a little more relaxed – because in the end everything will be done eventually – because things can be sorted out that didn’t work out at the beginning. So all the excitement and stress is not worth it.

That can be applied to many other things. What it needs from my point of view is: 

• Trust that everything will work out in the end.
• Experience that it almost always does.
• Patience that sometimes things don’t work out right away.
• Courage not to take oneself too seriously
• and last but not least: Humour, to make a good story out of all these experiences afterwards for a funny evening with friends.

I hope I can remember these good insights myself the next time something goes wrong. Somehow I often write for myself and get a little smarter with every blog post. 

However, I have noticed that since I wrote this post a fortnight ago, I have actually loosened up a bit. Some things have been sorted out, we’ve completed a lot of things and I’ve now got used to the unfinished jobs. I’m sure a solution will be found for them in the coming weeks.