The Beauty in the Dust: Growth in Imperfection

Thresholds That Truly Change Us

I’ve crossed plenty of thresholds in my life. Graduations, promotions, marriage, a few plaques on the wall. All those moments came and went, all important in their own way. Despite the cultural significance, and that many of these events are dear to many of you reading this, I can’t say any of these were truly transformative in my bones.

Only two experiences ever truly left me different on the other side: fatherhood and war. Profoundly different.

Thank goodness for fatherhood and its positive transformation. When my son hit the atmosphere and I realized that my wife and I had created an entirely new person for whom we bore total responsibility, I was changed forever. I thought it would happen only once, but when my daughter joined us a couple of years later, I was again profoundly transformed.

The feeling of being a new father is exhilarating, frightening, and sobering all at once. Adding “girl-dad” to the bio was no less impactful. Raising the sacred nature of our marriage into a family remains a high point of my life.

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A Gift in the Midst of War

War left its mark as well. Not one that can necessarily be seen, not always the kind you can explain, but the kind you carry. War is god-awful, and all of us carry different rocks home in our ruck. Sometimes these rocks are big and with substantial weight on their own. Sometimes they are smaller rocks that don’t seem like they should weigh you down, but they add up quickly when you have to carry all of them yourself.

Even folks who can’t point out something the size of a rock have brought back a whole bunch of sand and gravel that gets into everything else in the ruck. The one constant is that war has its effect, short term and long term.

During my deployment to Iraq, I hit a low point—a place where depression sat heavy and every day felt like a weight to carry. I was fortunate to have a good support system of friends and colleagues (a psychiatrist amongst them) who helped steady me. One of them gave me a gift I’ve carried ever since: a simple message, written late at night, trying to explain why we were friends.

I don’t wish to share the exact words—I reserve some things as sacred and choose to honor them with the dignity and privacy they deserve. I do wish to share the power of the message, as it is also sacred and honorable to spread the good; I think this honors another aspect of my friendship with this marvelous human: that of paying it forward. I hope she is honored to know I am using her words all these years later to create some beauty and peace.

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The Sunrise Metaphor

The metaphor: Sunrise…a beautiful, breathtaking, awe-inspiring sunrise. On superficial inspection one would expect this to be a result of purity, perfection, and regularity…but you’d be mistaken. Only in the reflection of light off dust particles does the majesty of a sunrise manifest.

The very notion of chaos, irregularity, and imperfection leads to the unique and incredible phenomenon of the sky becoming ablaze with color. In a perfectly clean and orderly world with pristine air…there would be no sunrise.

Nice huh? Yes, I have been blessed with humans of uncommon significance throughout my life. Here’s a secret—we all are blessed with humans of uncommon significance, but you have to be present and mindful to notice them. I didn’t for the longest time…and my good friend helped me become more aware of the potential for goodness and beauty all around me, in particular in the unique and special ways that flaws and imperfections bring texture and richness to our lives.

Imperfection is not the cause of the problem. Our framing and acknowledgement of imperfection, flaws, dust and dirt is within our control. Do we get up to see the sunrise and enjoy the light reflecting off all the little impurities that make each morning its own cosmic light show? Do we get to know the people around us for all their little flaws, idiosyncrasies, and predilections? Do we bask in the unique and powerful one-of-a-kind experience that each day is because of how individual individuals can be?

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Imperfection as the Medium of Growth

This doesn’t mean we romanticize weakness or excuse mediocrity. Too often, well-meaning people confuse kindness with lowering the bar, what I’ve called the soft bigotry of low expectations. It sounds gentle, but in truth it’s condescension.

Instead of empowering people through acceptance and inclusion, you risk crippling them with the yoke of a fixed mindset. Let’s not misuse the sunrise metaphor in the same way: we are not looking to excuse imperfection. We strive for the ideal of growth, optimizing potential, pursuing perfection in a quest for human fulfillment and flourishing…knowing damn well we’ll never get all the way there.

That’s the key to understanding the metaphor: flaws aren’t to be admired and accepted as a good in their own right. But the same way soot and dust and dreck in the atmosphere create the magnificent colors of the sunrise, our flaws lend individuality and uniqueness to our journey as humans in pursuit of our best.

These impurities in our being are the opportunities for us to pursue excellence, grow, and change. They allow us to connect with one another by noticing and lauding the person’s response to their flaws.

Get up early…go touch grass…see the sunrise and appreciate its majesty. Translate this to your relationships: get up early for others…go outside and beyond yourself…see them for who they are…truly see their individuality and authenticity as unique and amazing beings…and then root them on in their pursuits.

Partner with them as friends and mentors. Create the beauty of interacting and growing with others and know that it is your awareness of the flaws and your commitment to watching the journey of the person as you would watch the Apollo’s chariot rising in the sky that creates a monumental aspect of a life lived well.

A world with no variation, irregularity, or flaw is predictable, boring, and stultifyingly unsatisfying. Imagine a world so perfect we get no sunrise. Then indulge me in another thought exercise: imagine you got what you sometimes grumble about in the people who surround you—make them perfect without impurity and see if you could tolerate a world that resembled a dystopian nightmare like Pleasantville.

Why are imperfections and flaws so full of magic? In a sunrise, the dusty sky acts as a prism and provides us with a light show that reminds us all that beauty can be. In a person? Flaws and imperfections are annoying (they are in the atmosphere as well—they make the daytime hazy, and too much makes the air hard to breathe, and adds the possibility of smog to cities already cursed with traffic)…but what if we look at them in humans the same way we look at them in the sky at dawn.

Without a weakness, a flaw, or an obstacle we wouldn’t have the chance for growth, change, improvement. We would be denied the satisfaction of the journey either individually or as a mentor with a protégé.

Ryan Holiday has a whole book on “The Obstacle Is the Way.” He’s really just borrowing from the Stoics, the same way I often borrow from positive psychology. But the point stands: what resists us, what trips us up, is the opportunity to make us stronger and more fully ourselves.

For a long time, I saw flaws—my own and others’—as obstacles. Things to be managed, excused, or overcome. But I’ve come to see them differently. They are the medium through which growth occurs, the substrate of change.

Like dust in the sky, imperfections scatter the light in ways we never could have planned and create beauty if we get up early enough to experience it.

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Opportunity for Reflection

Sometimes we need someone else to point this out for us. My friend’s words did that for me. Years later, as I reread them, I’m reminded not only of her kindness but also of the way a single, thoughtful message can ripple through a life.

We rarely know when we are the dust in someone else’s atmosphere, scattering their light into colors they couldn’t see on their own.

So, dear reader, here’s where I turn it over to you. Pause for a moment. Think of a flaw or imperfection in yourself—not with shame or resignation, but with curiosity. How has that “dust” scattered the light of your life?

What growth, beauty, or connection has emerged because of it? Now think of a person whose words or actions left a mark on you, even years later. What did they say? How did it shape you? Finally, flip it around: whose life have you touched, perhaps without even realizing it? What words have you spoken that someone else may still be carrying?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Take the time to sit with them. Write them down. Honor them.

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Carrying the Light Forward

What my friend did with her words inspired me. No matter her intention, their impact is monumental. That is a sobering thought…we often are unaware of the profound good (or ill) our offhand words and actions can be to others.

I’m reminded of this frequently in my coaching and teaching pursuits, particularly with kids (I am a youth baseball and chess coach). Your life’s co-habitants may be more sensitive and perceptive than you are ever able to realize.

We are so caught up in our own lives that we don’t do the mindfulness equivalent of the online admonition to “go outside and touch grass.” It works not only to get out of internet echo chambers and bubbles but also in the individual headspace. Get outside your head…go touch the lives of the other people around you…see what you have been missing. You might find some words (or receive some words) that decades later you rely on and benefit so much from that you will owe.

I owe. I owe a debt I’ll never fully repay to a friend who gave me a source of beauty and peace when I needed it most. But maybe repayment isn’t the point. Maybe the point is to scatter that light further, to pay it forward.

That sense of owing sits with me whenever I see the sky break open at dawn. It reminds me that gifts like hers live on when we choose to carry them forward, when we let them change how we move through the world.

When I look at a sunrise now, I don’t just see the colors. I see the dust—the imperfections that made it possible. And I remember that war and fatherhood may have changed me, but so did friendship, kindness, and a few words whispered at the right time.

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