Good Enough

January 3, 2022

I was talking with my sister about New Year's resolutions today. Three days in, and we're both going strong. Yes, it's a low bar. Anyone can do three days. Three days of carving out time to read. Three days of 10,000 steps. Three days of blog posts. Three days of healthy eating. Three days of whatever. Three is nothing, a piece of cake. You know what's hard? That there are 362 more days in the year to keep it up. But we think about these resolutions in the wrong way sometimes--an all or nothing proposition. Let's say we get to Day 10, or Day 24, or even Day 115 and life interferes, as it often does. We get sick, or we have 12 meetings back-to-back, or a friend desperately needs our time, energy, and focus, and we miss the mark on those resolutions. No time to read, or a McDonald's run late at night on the way home for dinner, finally. Maybe instead of 10,000 we hit 8,500, or even just 2,000. Eating healthy isn't hard, really. 10,000 steps? Totally doable. The hard part is what happens when we miss, whether it be a day, or even week that we fail to meet those goals. There is such temptation to let that misstep become our destination, rather than a temporary pit-stop on the journey. We can see that pit-stop as a failure and we can beat ourselves up about it. Man, we can be hard on ourselves. There is a temptation to throw in the towel altogether. But missing a day doesn't mean the goal was a bad one, and it doesn't negate what we have done or can still do in the future. What if, instead, we practice the same grace we would give a friend if she told us she'd failed to meet a goal? We'd say that's okay, wouldn't we? We'd encourage her to try again tomorrow. We might suggest ways that she can meet that goal the next time; we might suggest ways we could help her meet that goal. Would we tell her to give it up because today didn't happen the way she planned? Of course not. Why do we do it to ourselves? If we hit one of those days or those weeks where life is happening to us, coming at us fast and furious and trying to blow us off track, maybe what we need to learn to say is "For today, that was good enough. That's what I was able to do, and I cannot do more than that, and that's okay. Tomorrow we try again." Sometimes we need to let good enough be good enough.