It’s almost officially winter, and my parents’ house is sixty-seven degrees. I’m freezing. In an effort to keep heat in, this morning I put on thick, wool socks and a knitted cap. Granted, I’m wearing a t-shirt, but I really, really hate “bulk.” People talk about their love of sweaters and scarves–and, oh my god, mittens!–but it’s simply not me. I much prefer shorts and a tank top, soaking up the sun on a warm beach. But back to the temperature inside this house–it’s my dad’s fault. He’s always hot, breaks a sweat at the drop of a hat, so he’s constantly inching the thermostat down, gradually turning our home into a seventeen-thousand-foot meat locker.

My mom and I fight for degrees. “Ron, would it be okay to turn the thermostat up to sixty-eight, just until we all go to bed?” my mom will say. Honestly, I don’t even bother. Granted, one degree is one degree, but ten would be better. Even now my toes are crowding against each other, huddled up trying desperately to produce heat. I’ve heard this happens when a person is dying–all the blood rushes away from your extremities and heads straight for your vital organs in an effort to preserve as much life as possible. For me this feels like those movies where sailors throw cargo off a ship to keep it from sinking. Every winter my body says, “Screw the toes, screw the feet–toss ’em overboard–who needs ’em?”

Oh sure, they only take us everywhere we go!

Okay, fine, I give up. I just put on a sweatshirt. I’m holding a cup of hot coffee like it’s a personal hand warmer. Because my butt never gets warm in the winter either, I’m thinking about sitting on a heating pad for the rest of the day. As for my feet, maybe I could put them in the microwave. Shit. Here I am considering nuking my own body, and ten feet away my dad is watching The People’s Court in a t-shirt, shorts, and bare feet, smiling, probably thinking how nice it’d be to have a fan on. I guess we all have our own standards of perfection.

The last time I saw my therapist, she asked, “Marcus, do you still believe in the idea of perfection?” I said, “Well, it sounds great, but I can’t find any evidence for it.” What I meant is that I’ve yet to discover something that couldn’t be better. No matter what the temperature is, I’d like to adjust the thermostat. No matter how good of a dancer or writer I am, I’d like to improve. Perfection, it seems, is ever-elusive. It’s a fantasy we think about that never materializes. It’s whatever we don’t have until we have it, then it’s something else.

Once I went to a workshop in Austin with Byron Katie. One of her teachings is that when we argue with reality, we lose. For example, if my feet are cold and I think they should be warm in this moment, I’m going to suffer (and write a blog about it). But what’s the truth? (They’re cold.) Anyway, at this workshop, Katie said that if we died and went to heaven with our current way of thinking, we wouldn’t be there any more. In other words, our minds would tell us, “It’s too windy–the gold streets are hard to walk on–I don’t like harp music–I wish John were here.” Or whatever–we all have our list of complaints we take everywhere we go.

I don’t use this line with anyone else, but whenever I leave the house and say goodbye to my parents, I say, “I’m off to change the world.” Mostly I consider this statement cute and ironic, since I spend the average day somewhere between a coffee shop and Walmart, picking my nose at traffic lights. Anyway, a couple days ago I was at my friend Bonnie’s house, and she had a funny napkin that said, “What did you do to change the world today?” Well, the guy on the napkin’s answer was, “I changed my socks! That counts!”

Believing that you can find wisdom almost anywhere, I’ve been meditating on that napkin since I saw it. For one thing, I think changing the world is easier than we think. Like, I could start wearing wool socks, and that really could make a difference. I could be warmer, happier, easier to get along with. In this sense, it’s the little things. But for another thing, I don’t think we can really change the world. Sure, we can make a difference, and we should. But the world is a mess–it always has been and always will be. It’s too cold for one person, too hot for another. Maybe you think there’s too much violence or too much pollution, but the point is the same–if you want to find a problem, you will. So rather than trying to change the world, perhaps our time is better spent trying to change ourselves, working on the way we see the world, and realizing that life is perfect just the way it is.