Unintentional Beauty by Karin Brünnemann

 

Unintentional Beauty

OR:

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

by Karin Brünnemann

Recently, I wanted to take a photo of Moon and Mars, as they were visible close to each other. As I did not apply the correct camera settings, the results were not as expected. The exposure time was far too long for me to hold the camera still, capturing a powerful streak instead of the lunar sphere and only a faint doodle of our neighboring planet.  My immediate thought was to remove the picture, but my thumb hovered above the delete icon. Wait a minute. This is not what I had imagined – but wasn’t there something beautiful in this celestial image? Something captivating? Something out of this world? I decided to keep the photo, corrected my camera settings, and took a “proper” photo as I originally intended. I did manage to capture the heavenly bodies in close proximity in all their beauty, however, compared to the “failed” strong and streaky shot, this photo appeared rather unspectacular, vacuous.

 A few clicks later, the bold streak almost looks like an intentional artwork. Once again, I find myself musing about perfectionism. Isn’t perfectionism a narrow one-way street? A cul-de-sac? When striving for the perfect, don’t we leave heaps of good on either side of our fairway? Should we not appreciate the beauty in the unintentional instead of devaluating “flaws” and “failures”? Should we hover our thumbs more often over the delete icon before discarding an idea, a piece of work, a relationship? Should we expose ourselves more to the unexpected, the unusual, the imperfect? Should we take our time to appreciate less-than-perfect results and create something good from it? Something better? Better than perfect?