Life breaks us some days, making the work of being human hard. I often think about the connection between perfection and attitudes about health.

Many strive for perfection knowing it’s never attainable. Why try? They work to master something that is not possible. Do they forget that wisdom is made of hard-learned experiences?

An invasive illness can break the body, mind, and spirit. Illness can exhaust days, weeks, and lives. With cancer, we manage as best we can. Illness is a time when we hopefully accept our humanness.

On an uncertain journey with serious illness, I see two different directions of beliefs.

One direction seeks meaning about how an illness may redirect and enhance a person. Rather than seeing themselves as broken down, the “wisdom-seekers” gather curiosity. They reexamine their life choices and attitudes. Even through anger, sadness, and fear and sometimes even alongside an incurable illness. Their center is to make some kind of meaning. They savor what they still have, not what they don’t. Even during months or years of discomfort.

The other direction carries a heavy load of blame and shame. This group believes they did something wrong to deserve this disease. They stay stuck in a rut of hopelessness and guilt. Behavioral choices do impact health.  Sometimes choices are deeply rooted in trauma or an absence of something and can be complicated to change. However, staying stuck in a rut of guilt does not allow healing in.

How can more of us gracefully shift to believe, deep in our bones, that with or without illness, we are all imperfect? No one is immune to imperfection. No one is guaranteed a life without health scares and serious setbacks. Logically we know this, yet when it happens it is hard to be prepared for the fear of it all.

The Latin word for courage is “cor” and means “heart.” To have courage is to have heart. To have heart is to have courage. Someone told me to see life with my heart. I try, I fail and I practice again trying to see the sometimes difficult world around me through my heart.

The well-known researcher Brene’ Brown has one of the most watched TED Talks, “The Power of Vulnerability.” She explains that people who live from a deep sense of worthiness are “wholehearted” people. She found that wholehearted people are vulnerable and dare to be imperfect. Wholehearted people also have a positive pattern of three characteristics: courage, self-compassion, and connection.

Health research shows that people moving through serious illness and other struggles fare better when they make meaning from their experience. Making meaning requires learning and unlearning. It’s a practice. A practice of living and breathing in and out an imperfect life. A practice of living with an imperfect body.

I believe that health crises can teach. Maybe to teach that we have to bond with the difficult, alongside the easier times. We can honor both even sometimes simultaneously. Maybe a simpler reminder is: that an imperfect body, in an imperfect life, is simply a life.

Honoring doesn’t mean agreeing with what happened. Rather, we show compassion for ourselves when life gets harder and we get injured or sick. We can find some safety even in imperfection. We acknowledge that we do the best we can and our best changes all the time.

The philosopher George Santayana said, “To be interested in the changing seasons is the happier state of mind, rather than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” Life is the practice of living through all the seasons.

We can move through the seasons when the weather isn’t perfect. We can move through the seasons when we aren’t perfect.

Let’s summon the courage to allow imperfection in all the seasons of our lives. Let’s allow imperfection to guide us wholeheartedly when things fall apart. Let’s see the wisdom and know we are all similarly imperfect and not designed in body, mind, or spirit to be perfect.

Author is Patti Carey, theartofmindfulhealing.com