Good Enough

This bunny balloon blew into my yard and settled into my wildflower patch earlier this week. Biscuit growled at it. He was not a fan. I couldn’t blame him. It was a little strange.

Sometimes it is annoying when people sweetly tell you to “just do your best.” Because of course it is almost always possible to do something a little better. If I spend all day on it. If I have more time.

But most days, there isn’t more time. There is reality, and reality does not lend itself to doing one’s best at every moment. So I am trying to reframe the way I think about this. Instead of striving to always do my best, I am deciding to be happy with “good enough.”

Because good enough is, well, good enough.

I had two days in a row at home this week with nowhere I needed to go, which is one of my favorite things. Home is where I would probably stay most days if I didn’t have to work. Because there is much to do at home, and most of these tasks are things that I enjoy, especially the outdoor ones. I like working in the yard. I like taming the blackberries. I even like weedeating.

Except I can take the weedeater out and work until the battery runs down and turn around to survey my progress and realize that the weeds look like someone has given them a bad haircut. My work is not smooth like the weedeating the professionals do. It’s choppy and uneven. It wouldn’t pass for anyone’s version of “best.” I could feel bad about that and go inside and charge up the battery again and head out for another round. Or I could realize that it’s much better than when I started, leave it as it is, and call it good enough.

(Because it is.)

There were other things this week that had to be “good enough.”

My neighbor had some weedeating done by a local landscaping company. I came home from work to find that the back windshield of my little snow car was shattered. It’s likely that one of their weedeaters hit a rock that hurdled across the street into my window. I bet that the worker didn’t even notice. He had headphones on and the car was a few feet away. It would have been nice for the landscape company’s owner to pay for all of the damage, but I didn’t have any proof that it was their fault. He did offer to pay for half, though, and he did it quickly without complaint. That ended up being good enough, and I was grateful, especially when he really didn’t have to help at all.

It’s also good that I figured out how to contact a mobile windshield repair company, one that is just a few miles down the road from my home, and the owner came the next morning when he said he would and did the job in the amount of time that he predicted and charged what he promised and sent a receipt right away. It was basically perfect customer service. That was better than good enough and was something else to be thankful for.

I finally dug a couple of holes for trees that came a few weeks ago from the Arbor Day Foundation. That package had an ominous warning about “Live plants! Open right away!” They arrived during a rainy spell, though, so they sat in their little plastic bag for longer than was ideal. The Arbor Day Foundation brochures make the tree planting process seem easy. Maybe most Arbor Day members do not have yards that are mostly rocks with a wee bit of soil on top. I got two of the ten trees planted the other day, which would certainly not qualify as “best” by anybody’s standards. The other eight? They look like twigs with sad dangly roots at the end. But the fact that I got two planted that seemed like they were still alive and felt pretty good about the soil prep? Good enough.

I finally bought a new to me iPhone and also purchased a screen protector. Applying the screen protector was something my children always did for me. I did it myself this time. It’s not perfect: it’s slightly off center and has a bump or two. But guess what? It’s doing the job. It’s good enough.

There is still a part of me that worries that “good enough” isn’t. I think that part will always be there. It’s an overachiever. This part is telling me now that this blog post could be better if I worked on it a little longer (even though it’s already nearly 10:00 PM on Saturday night and I had a long work day today). Certainly, it could use a more clever ending! And further explanation about that weird bunny balloon photo at the top! It wouldn’t be good to end a blog like this, would it?