The Mediocrity of Excellence

Just brooding over this concept of excellence today - more a thinking-out-loud/rough-draft/thought experiment than articulating a position…

The problem with excellence is that it’s achievable within our own natural capacity and abilities.  You can get there with enough time, effort, skill dev, resources, etc.  Anybody can get there.  If you don’t have the capacity/proficiency/time to do it yourself – you hire.

Excellence is mathematical, logical and has a limit.  It’s quantifiable.  Has structure and rules.  The paths/means can vary greatly as long as they are relatively efficient and as long as the end/product/result is excellent.  Once something is fully excellent you are done – it can’t be made MORE excellent without changing parameters - but even that is still just playing with the inputs of the same basic restrictive equation - which can never balance out to a result greater than excellent.

Could it be that this concept of excellence is actually just low hanging fruit?  Actually mediocre compared to fruit higher up on the tree?  Yet that’s what we strive after as the ultimate, the pinnacle, the zenith in what we’re pursuing or attempting… both in the church and the corporate world and human endeavour in general.  Why, even if everything is excellent, do I feel like something elusive and nebulous is missing - my soul still having a shadow of dissatisfaction somehow?  In the same way that my head is satisfied with the scientific explanation of reality but my heart doesn’t buy it.

May I suggest the possibility of a higher more noble pursuit…  fruit that grows higher up on the tree…

Elegance.

Within elegance, excellence is inherent and intrinsic but resplendently veiled and diluted and dispersed into enhancing shades of colour and hints of pleasant aromas and richness of underlying textures.

Excellence can be cold, calculating, exacting, innocuous and devoid of beauty and grace.  All that’s required is that it is excellent.  It’s doesn’t have to have colour that soothes your eyes, an aroma that stirs memory or a taste that explodes.  It just has to perfectly fit the legal requirements and genetic parameters to be fruit.  It’s irrelevant how easy it is to reach or how low it hangs on the tree - it just has to be on the tree.

Elegance is the territory of x-factor, where there is room for the sum to be greater than the parts.  It’s artistic.  Harmoniously inuitive and counter-intuitive.  It’s transcendant.  It’s where it moves beyond us, becomes bigger than us, yet may involve path and process and result that is actually easier, simpler, spiritual even, and more fluid and organic than mere excellence.

Excellence is the matrix and Elegance is Neo.

It’s the layer above excellence where God can move and faith is released and love and soul can glow no matter the arena of pursuit.

As workers in the church, maybe the difference between our days grinding like a job versus flowing like a ministry…

is which fruit we set our desire on.