"Good enough" is popping up all around me. 6 months ago I entered motherhood and now good enough parenting catches my eye. I'm nearly finished with Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Big Magic, and themes of mundane and persistence stand out - a sort of gentle nudge to just do it every day, even if your writing is total crap and you don't feel at all creative. I even tried to write this blog weeks ago, the words came out just right, and then as I went to publish I accidentally deleted it. My second attempt will have to be good enough, because the ideal first version is long gone.
Good enough is normally unacceptable. I have high standards, my family's are even higher. I'm genetically predisposed to perfectionism. But I'm tired to my bones. I don't know when I'll really sleep. And so "good enough" isn't such a stretch. My yoga practice is a shadow of what it once was. My work is adequate. My cooking lacks creativity, but is edible. I dress merely to be clothed, not to make any fashion statement.
Good enough feels like failure. I suffer greatly in my attachment to perfectionism. I like to believe I'm in total control of my life and when it's merely a fraction of what I believe I'm capable of, I think I am to blame. I wrestle constantly with hope, which seems so virtuous but always lets me down. My instinct is to run from hopelessness, but I can't shake it. So here I am, muddling through, suffering greatly, and then my friend brings Pema Chodren back into my life. She's got everything and more to say about my particular suffering. This week I'm re-reading this passage from When Thing Fall Apart as if my life depends on it.
“The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience up or liven it down or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.
Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keeping looking for alternatives.
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape? We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.”
It's funny, this passage. It gives me a new perspective on the moon cards I read every morning. Earlier this week, before reading chapter 7 in Pema, I picked up my card for Day 19 of the lunar cycle.
I usually hate drawing this card. I want to skip over Day 19, pretend it doesn't exist. Except this time through the deck I'm confronted with shit head on. Flying shit. My son sneeks a dirty diaper into our afternoon. I go to change him, expecting just another wet cloth. I fling the the diaper open and there goes poop. I can't see it, but I can smell it. I'm forced to let eyesight play second fiddle to my sense of smell and let my nose seek it out. I find a nice little stinky clump sitting on the pretty cream crib bumper. I shake my head, hold my breath, then go ahead and grab that little piece of poop and toss it out. There's a tiny mark left behind, but really, no one else would know. I could undo all those nice little ties and do yet another load of laundry. Instead, I just leave it. It's clean enough. And time to let good enough be good enough.