Good enough. Clean enough. Straight enough. Complete enough. Birthday cakes and front lawns. Lists of chores to do and places to visit and holiday cards to send. Good enough is enough. It is wonderful. It took me most of a lifetime to realize this and feel comfortable (enough) with this. Please don’t wait as long as I did!
I often resonate between feeling that everything that I experience is universal, common, even banal, and then flipping again back to “no one can relate to this” or I’m writing simply to and for an audience of one, myself. I wonder if I will ever really know? I wonder what would happen if I did? Would I vanish, or be raptured, or wake up from the dream?
Do you have a roof and a refrigerator of food and the ability to read this to at least one other who loves you? Are you good enough? Is your work product, your blood chemistry, your outlook for living the whole darn week all good-enough? If something is short of enough, do you know how to nudge it towards that squishy stretch goal of good-enough (can something be simultaneously squishy and stretched)? Do you have (enough) support and time and energy? Do you love yourself enough? Do you trust and respect and marvel at YOU enough?
Perfect is an illusion, near perfect the same. Perfect is impossible for so many reasons. Nothing is static, so if it were perfect it would not be a microsecond later or three microns to the left (what is the absolute reference frame anyway?). How ugly perfect would be, how dead, how fragile, how lonely, how useless.
Imperfect is very real. It makes up the cosmos and our cornflakes. Really imperfect is lazy and dishonest. Lazy and dishonest are not what we want to construct our lives with. Just close your eyes. Breath in really deeply, plug your nose and allow your pursed lips to dribble out your warm life slowly as your body and immune system operate good enough, even really good enough.
There really is not even need to measure good enough, nor to test for it. We know it. We feel it. It is real and organic. Every sunset is good enough, some “more good” enough than others. Holding a child’s gaze with our own is very very nearly always good enough. Both us grown-ups and the little babbling ones know this deeply. It is even encoded into our genome.
Good enough is not universal though. It is not a force field or a get out of jail pass. Compassion and justice and truth and charity are seldom good enough. Once again, we can simply feel this. I know that I can always improve on these and more. Even if these things are not good enough, they are good enough for right now.
Good enough does not dissolve in sunlight or oral repetition. Good enough cannot be hidden in a closet, it really can never live there. Likely if you or I am struggling with this then we have some work to do. We are always walking the path. The path does not end, the walk does not cease, but it, like this prayer is good enough, at least for today. And that is at least good-enough if not wonderful.
