(Photo courtesy of Paul Pastourmatzis, unsplash.com)

There’s a particular cruelty in having tasted perfection. Not the manufactured kind that comes in glossy magazine spreads or Instagram filters, but the real, accidental kind that ambushes you when you least expect it. I’m talking about that one peach you bit into years ago – the one so outrageously perfect that juice ran down your arm while time seemed to stop. And now every peach since has been auditioning for a role it can never fill.

We all have our perfect peaches. Maybe yours was a conversation that flowed like water until 3 AM, leaving you feeling truly seen. Maybe it was laughter so pure it made your ribs ache for days. Or perhaps it was that one sexual encounter that felt like you’d discovered a new continent on the map of your own body. Whatever it was, it set the bar, and nothing since has quite measured up.

The human brain plays an especially nasty trick on us here. As neuropsychologist Rick Hanson explains, “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.” Except, cruelly, for those peak positive experiences – those stick like superglue and become the measuring stick for everything that follows. A dozen perfectly lovely meals blur together in memory, but that one transcendent bite of food at that little place in Barcelona? That gets its own shrine in your neural pathways.

My friend David, celebrating his fiftieth birthday last year, confessed to me over coffee: “I keep trying to recreate our honeymoon in Kauai. Twenty-two years later, I’m still booking ocean-view rooms hoping to feel what I felt that first morning waking up to the sound of waves. My wife thinks I’m being romantic. I’m actually chasing a ghost.”

This is what writer Alain de Botton calls “the tyranny of the superlative” – our peculiar modern obsession with having only the most extraordinary experiences. “We have houses, but we want dream houses,” he writes. “We have friends, but we want soul mates.” And this constant reaching for the peak experience depletes our capacity to appreciate the merely good.

I’ve watched this happen with my creative friends too. A filmmaker I know had his first documentary screened at a prestigious festival. The standing ovation, the tearful audience members who approached him afterward, the reviews that called his work “revelatory” – it was lightning in a bottle. Three films later, he admits to me that each project since has been shadowed by that first success. “I keep chasing that high,” he told me, “instead of letting each story find its own truth.” The memory of that peak experience became both his greatest blessing and a subtle curse.

Mary Oliver, that most graceful of poets, understood this trap when she wrote: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” What a relief, that permission to be ordinary! To write an ordinary poem, have an ordinary day, eat an ordinary peach.

Part of growing older – maybe the essential part – is learning to make peace with the vast middle ground between transcendence and tragedy. To find richness in the seven-out-of-ten days. To stop treating the perfectly adequate present as a disappointing sequel to some golden past.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who pioneered research on “flow states” (those magical periods of complete immersion in a perfectly challenging activity), found something fascinating: people who frequently experience flow don’t necessarily chase the high of their best flow experience. Instead, they create conditions where moderate flow is possible nearly every day. They’ve learned that consistency trumps intensity.

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times,” he writes. “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Note that he doesn’t say stretched to absolute breaking points of ecstasy – just stretched enough.

I’m thinking now of my neighbor Eleanor, eighty-three years old, who tends her garden with the same patient attention every single day. I asked her once if she missed the elaborate gardens she kept in her younger years when she had more strength and energy. She looked at me like I was slightly dim.

“This tomato plant needs me today,” she said, gently tying it to a stake. “Yesterday’s garden is compost now.”

There’s profound wisdom there, in learning to love what’s actually possible in the present rather than chasing the ghost of what once was. The perfect peach is already gone. It composted long ago. But today’s peach – a little firm on one side, maybe not quite as sweet – is an actual miracle sitting in your actual hand.

Anne Lamott would probably tell us, in her wonderfully profane way, that this is what grace looks like: accepting the imperfect gift of this ordinary day. She famously wrote, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.” Perhaps what she meant is that pursuing only peak experiences makes us tyrants over our own lives, rejecting the abundant feast of good-enough moments laid before us.

So maybe the answer isn’t to stop chasing the peach dragon entirely – those peak moments do add extraordinary color to our lives. But perhaps wisdom lies in remembering that dragons are mythical creatures. The real animal of everyday happiness is more like a steady, faithful dog – less dramatic but actually present, actually capable of warming your feet on an ordinary Tuesday night.

That dog deserves some love too.