Meditations 1: Between Greatness and Flaw

Greatness is fleeting. Flaw is permanent. Meaning lies in how we carry both.

Editor’s Note
Meditations is a series of personal reflections written not to comfort or confess, but to think clearly — and without illusion — about the contradictions we live with. These entries are not arguments, nor are they consolations. They are attempts to clarify what resists simplification, and to sit with tensions that do not resolve on demand.

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.”
— Carl Jung

The question, if it deserves such dignity, is this: how are we to live with the fact that we are, at once, architects of meaning and authors of catastrophe?

We build systems of law, write symphonies, chart the stars — and in the same breath, we betray, destroy, and forget. Greatness appears in flashes. Flaw is constant. The contradiction isn’t peripheral to the human story. It is the story.

We speak of greatness as though it were a stable trait — something intrinsic, sculpted into the soul. In truth, it arrives in flashes, disappears without ceremony, and is usually surrounded by the far more familiar detritus of doubt, contradiction, vanity, and error.

Must greatness be sterilised of flaw to count as real? Or is it, more likely, dependent on it? Is it a condition of purity, or simply a brief coherence pulled from the usual human wreckage?

If greatness means anything at all, it may begin not with triumph, but with an unflinching recognition of one’s limitations — and the audacity to act regardless.

Some people spend their lives in denial. They refuse the most obvious thing about themselves: that imperfection is not a flaw in the system — it is the system. Others are consumed by it, treating their flaws as if they were administrative errors in need of correction. Convinced, often absurdly, that if they just apply enough discipline, they might one day be entitled to exist.

I am learning that both positions are untenable.

One hides from the condition. The other wages war on it. I’ve tried both. I’ve polished the image, and I’ve attempted to reengineer the core. Neither led anywhere worth going.

It would seem that self-acceptance has little to do with denial, and even less with improvement. Instead, it must involve the far duller task of living with both light and shadow, allowing neither to seize the entire frame.

If humanness is an obstacle, it’s a strangely universal one — and I’ve seen no convincing memo from life requesting its removal.

This isn’t to say greatness is out of reach. But it does suggest we should stop mistaking it for identity. Greatness is not what we are. It’s what occasionally passes through — briefly, conditionally, and without notice. We can express it. We can offer it. But we cannot possess it.

Likewise, we are not our flaws. We carry them, yes, but they do not get to carry us. Flaw is not failure. It is the entry price for being alive. We might call it the watermark of our species.

So how are we to identify? Not with greatness — that burns too hot. Not with deficiency — that corrodes. If anything, we ought to identify with the tension between the two: the narrow and shifting corridor between what we are capable of and what we can barely endure.

To be human is to stand in that corridor — to act while fully aware of your weakness, to reach for beauty with no claim to deserving it. To move toward the good not because you are good, but because, occasionally, you’ve seen it.

And what might that look like? A person of no particular renown. Capable of extraordinary things, but never obsessed with the fact. A person who lets greatness pass through him like weather — without mistaking it for climate. Because the moment we confuse our best moment for our entire being, we’re no longer free. We’ve become a hostage to our own highlight reel.

The boundary between greatness and flaw is not clean. It doesn’t separate like oil and water. More often, it coagulates — and becomes something else entirely. The very impulses we tend to call irrational — to love without calculation, to act without benefit, to intervene when there’s no obligation — do not emerge despite our flaws, but through them.

These are not symptoms of moral clarity. They are products of something older and messier — an instinct older than reason, the kind that throws itself forward before there’s time to explain why. A flaw, perhaps, that chooses love over safety. That breaks the rule to keep the vow.

What is greatness, if it is not given away?

But the man feared that his flaws, once seen, would stain the glow of admiration. He didn’t believe he could carry both — the beauty and the imperfection. So he left. He disappeared. Not because he was rejected — but because he was loved.

He mistook flaw for failure, and greatness for burden.

And that, perhaps, is the more ordinary tragedy — not that we fall short of greatness, but that we never learn how to carry it without apology.

The task, then, is not to bleach ourselves of contradiction. That’s theology disguised as therapy. The more honest project is to live with both sides in plain view — to let the tension stand unedited, unreconciled.

It may be enough to simply show up — not as an example, but as a witness. To act while fractured. To be seen fully and not retreat.

We are not here to be flawless.
We are here to be. Even if it’s just for a moment.