I used to rush through things
as if staying too long meant I was falling behind.
Finish the draft.
Move on.
Start something new.
But the longer I stayed with the work,
the more I noticed something strange:
My hands changed before the work did.
The sentence I once accepted
suddenly felt unfinished —
not because it was wrong,
but because I could now see more.
Writers don’t rewrite because they failed.
They rewrite because staying
reveals things rushing never could.
Maybe being “in perfection”
has less to do with arriving
and more to do with remaining.
Remaining long enough
for your eyes to sharpen.
Letting your patience deepen.
Allowing past effort to meet
a slightly wiser version of you.
Because how would we ever discover
a better version of something
if we treated the first one as final?
So maybe perfection was never the flawless result.
Maybe it was the willingness to stay —
to walk the same road again,
not to repeat yourself,
but to see what you couldn’t see before.
And maybe the road itself
was the most perfect place to be
all along.