Good Enough

This morning I did my daughter's braids before school.

They weren't perfect. A few strands had escaped.

The Manager was immediate: do them again.

I stopped. And I actually looked at the situation.

In two seconds those braids would slip anyway. She'd be wearing a hat all morning. She wasn't going to a beauty pageant. She didn't care.

Why did I care?

I let her go to school with imperfect braids.

I have spent so much of my life making things into projects.

Not just tasks — projects. With standards. With a right way to do them. A level of completion that would finally be enough.

Wash some dishes? No. If I start I need to clean the whole kitchen.

Tidy the sofa table? No. Everything needs to be put away properly.

Weed the garden? No. It needs to be done properly, section by section.

The standard was always just high enough to make starting feel pointless.

So I didn't start.

The mess stayed. The garden stayed wild. The dishes piled up.

It looked like laziness from the outside. It wasn't laziness. It was The Manager's impossible standard making every partial action feel like failure before it even began.

The Practice

Last week I was weeding dandelions in the garden.

I did what I had time for.

Then I stopped. Put down the tools. Left the rest.

Old me would have felt the undone dandelions as a kind of accusation. Evidence of not finishing. Not enough.

But I just did what I had time for. And the garden didn't collapse. The dandelions waited. Life continued.

A few days ago I took ten minutes and removed some excess toys from my daughter's room.

No planning. No list. No dedicated Saturday with labelled boxes and a system.

Just ten minutes. The obvious things. Done.

The room is lighter. That lightness is real even though I didn't do the whole thing.

What I'm Understanding

Good enough isn't a lowered standard.

It's the removal of the story around the standard.

The dishes I wash are washed. Not a failed attempt at a clean kitchen — just dishes, washed, done. The dandelions I pulled are gone. The toys removed are gone. The braids held well enough for a school morning.

None of it needed to be more than it was.

The Manager convinced me for years that partial action was the same as no action. That if I couldn't do it properly I shouldn't start. That the gap between what I did and what I could have done was what mattered.

But the gap isn't what matters.

It took me a long time to understand that the perfectionism wasn't making things better.

Now I realise done is better than perfect.

🌲