Drops of Perfectionism

Sweat beat down my brow as I bent over, submerged in the wild humidity of equatorial Africa. It was Day Three and I was still transitioning from -40 degree temperatures of Minnesota to sweating at nine o’clock at night (and nine in the morning, for that matter). One of the women sloshed another bucket of water at my feet, its droplets fanning out like a fern leaf on the dusty floor. They continued to haul buckets of water from the nearby orphanage, although if they had looked closely they might have noticed that the sweat running down my forehead and neck was more than enough moisture to mop the whole room three times over. I was pretty sure that my own perspiration was some sheerly defiant water droplets that had I guzzled before we started cleaning. Apparently water wages a quick war for its re-emancipation in that climate. I noticed that none of the women working around me had a single bead of sweat on their foreheads. I had a long way to go to be African.

While they carried water and I supplied my own from endless perspiration, the room slowly took shape. First we washed the paint-splattered cement floor, pushing dirty water out the door and soaking up the rinse water with small, thin towels. I scanned the room thinking about how many spills we’d have on the scratchy cement. To my relief the women started carrying in rolls of synthetic flooring to cover the rugged cement. As we fit five long strips of flooring over the cement the room began to look more like a classroom. A second cycle of carrying buckets and scrubbing floors ensued as we now washed the floor covering, covered in dust from sitting in storage over the dry season. Water, scrub, water, scrub. The women seemed to be moving faster than me, but I just couldn’t get some spots clean. Anxiety welled up in me as I began to feel nervous that they would think I couldn’t manage their kids, that I was terrible at cleaning, that I was slow or inept. I scrubbed harder and harder at what was now an invisible mark. Cautiously, I glanced to one side to see if I could tell how true my fears were.

At this point it would have made for a great story if my palms slipped and sent me spiraling into a face plant my little puddle. Oddly, however, that kind of humiliation I could have survived. The thought that I was too incompetent or too 'soft' to wash a floor on my hands and knees was far more painful. But as I looked to my right and my left a second time, a bit of a laugh welled up in my throat. This is Africa, I realized. My eyes wandered to the dusty plain on the other side of the window and the sand pillars swirling up into the sky. There is no such thing as perfectly clean in Africa. Little did I know that I was about to meet several species of mammoth spiders and countless scorpions that would reinforce this understanding that you couldn’t build anything to keep Africa out of Africa.

We finished the floor up pretty quickly after that, and I realized that in a mere thirty minutes of being down on my knees with a rag and some water, I knew what one of my great lessons from Africa would be. Letting go of performance, of perfection, was the thing that would hit below gut-level. The following three months of cleaning up after anywhere between 8-20 kids on a daily basis continued to show me the futility of breaking my back to have a perfectly clean classroom. And likewise, a perfectly clean soul. The idea of doing everything right, disguised by the pretense of meeting God halfway, gave me every reason to be legitimately afraid or anxious because living like that made me responsible for good in the world. It is a rare moment that changes our lives entirely, but it is a defining moment when a change to your mindset shifts more than one way you view the world. In that chasm between good and perfection in a humble classroom underneath the peak of Kilimanjaro, I had a moment where I saw a different mindset.

The good news is we don’t have to be drenched in sweat to dial it into our lives.


Above: African student dancing in the heat, not sweating