The Courage To Care

Good recording equipment
picks up every noise.
If you move or breathe
or open your mouth wrong,
you just made work for someone to clean it up.

I’ve bought different headphones over the years.
The better the headphones, the more they revealed.
I thought I recorded a perfectly fine teaching audio.
But the headphones broadcast
all the noises of the room
the microphone picked up.

"Fixing" human flaws is big business.
Not really fixing flaws 
so much as hiding them.

Technology across the board
from photography to movies
to the back up cameras
and blind spot monitors in cars
shine bright lights on all we miss.

Perfection is an unwinnable battle.
If there are flaws,
technology will find a lot of them.
Great for car brakes.
For human beings, it depends. :)

You don’t have to make things perfect.
But you can make something beautiful - to you.

Some people like “good enough.”
Sometimes because it’s functional
and sometimes it keeps them
from caring too much
and getting hurt.

The minute your work
leaves your hands
machine and human eyes
measure and quantify it.

Under the harsh light
of impossible perfection
caring takes the long view.

Because there’s a difference
between having skin in the game
and having your heart in it.

It depends of course
what you’re doing all this for.