Scratches > Polish

It’s a statement of a car commercial running on TV right now. The underlying presumption is to enjoy life. Instead of having a good-looking, shiny, polished life,

live!

Yes, you’ll get scratches and imperfections. You’ll be sweaty, exhausted, and hurt at times. But you will have lived.

Fully living life is not throwing caution to the wind and refusing to apply common sense and wisdom. It’s not doing whatever you want, focusing on selfishness and failing to consider others. It’s not justifying everything you do as “just doing life.”

Fully living life includes humility, transparency, honesty, accountability, and lots and lots of patience. The pay-off of the depth and breadth of joy that come with those sacrifices is abundant. The people with whom you end up investing and living are beautiful.

When you live a polished life, you try to protect that polish. You don’t want any imperfections to taint that shiny smoothness. You try to cover any scratch, seeing those scratches as inconveniences that happen to you. But those scratches remind us of our real life experiences. Our imperfections, which are inevitable whether we acknowledge them or not, become part of our memory banks and learning curves.

When that scratch happens today, shift your perspective. It might just add character.