Recently I watched my 16-year-old son practicing martial arts. I stood amazed, as with steady composure he navigated a long series of complex movements in one fluid dance. Why amazed? Probably for the same reason I was stunned to behold the arc of his head just moments after his birth. Because perfection--real perfection, not the gnarly kind that nags you until you get it right, but the pure-flowing kind--always comes as a delightful surprise. Why can't we make perfection happen when we want it to? Because it's the very serendipitousness, the unexpected nature, of the gracefulness of human movement or of the appearance (once again! imagine!) of a brand new human being, that makes us say "How wonderful! That's perfection." If we could predict it, it wouldn't be perfect. By allowing ourselves to be surprised--in the act of writing, or anywhere else in life--we open to the miraculous. Only the miraculous is truly perfect, those moments of beauty and truth we know we couldn't have created on our own.

Yet if we