KINGSVIEW

JUST GOOD ENOUGH

Michael A. King

Our cultural obsession with being best is tragic. Ceaselesly we Americans in our millions pursue Number One status, including on that world stage where overweening hubris reaps the whirlwind. But what a waste, since 99.999 percent of us are doomed never to cross the magic line dividing us peons from the .001 percent who are best at whatever is being measured.

Yes, I’d more likely defend striving for the best if I had won my version of the Tour de France six times, like Lance Armstrong, and so was in a position to defend being not only the best cyclist but also the best .001 divided by 6 = .0001666.

However, it so happens that I fall among the 99.999 percent. Still somewhere in the 80-90 (Or higher? The dreams die hard) percentile, I’d like to think, but not up where I once dreamed. From boyhood on the Icarus story gripped me, so this was my plan: Like Icarus I’d soar, but then, remembering how the sun melted the wax of his wings, humbly accept my limits a few feet below the melting point.

Now, however, kicking and screaming, under pressure from reality itself, I am suspecting I must truly make peace with being less than the best. Among factors that have both forced but also increasingly enticed me to think this way are these:

I’m Going to Die

Twenty-five years ago I’d have said, "We are going to die," but that would have meant "I know we’re all going to die, including me, but a.) if I do it’s so far away it doesn’t count and b.) maybe I’ll be special enough to earn a "get out of death" Monopoly card. Now I’m 50. People I grew up thinking of as deathless giants are dead. And 25 years from now looks a lot different than 25 years from then did 25 years ago. It’s coming. I’m just plain running out of time to join the .001 Platinum Club.

Smelling the
Roses Really Is More Fun

Maturing is like a spiral—you pass some insights again and again, just at different levels on the way. So I’ve been here before. Not quite as urgently, but truly enough to have experienced that often being less gripped by being best = happier. How much I’ve missed when I’ve treated the road to bestness as the interstate and all the rest as the outmoded and dying—but so often so much more magical—Route 66 it replaces.

Just Good
Enough Is Good Enough

Oh, but even here, see the problem? We’ve heard this all before. Stop and smell the roses. Slow down. Learn to be, not just do. If I were the best, maybe I could offer some amazing new twist, but I’m too ordinary for that. I’m just groping along with all the rest of us, it turns out, and anyone with half a brain’s been here before.

But what am I or you to be if not the best? Just good enough. Because I’m not the best, let me hasten to say that’s not my idea. I read it somewhere and it gripped me; I think maybe it’s even becoming a popular concept somewhere in the psychotherapy world, but in my just-good-enough way I forget where. Still it strikes me as an inviting and healing idea. Just good enough. Doing whatever you know to do to live up to your potential, your calling. But knowing you’ll never get all the way. Yet that will have its own benefits, such as—

Just-Good-Enough-ers
Can Enjoy the Company

Traveling to .001 is lonely—you have to pass by everyone else or run them off the road. But what a 99.999 crowd, nearly the whole world, we Just-Good-Enough-ers get to travel with! Imagine the planetary camaraderie that could ensue if just-good-enough-ness rather than bestness drove our foreign policy.

Just Good Enough
May Be Closer to Salvation

There may be religions that tell you bestness = salvation. But most, to the extent my just-good-enough studies have yielded accurate impressions, say instead that just good enough = closer to salvation. Most one way or another say you have to fail to win. You have to give up your life to find it—as the hero of my own Christian tradition taught and modeled. You have to relinquish your attachment to the "I" you think is you to be truly yourself. You have to stop flapping upwind toward .001 to realize that all the time the thermals of love were just waiting for you to soar on them.

Just good enough is, I think, a way of releasing ourselves to not have to be more than ordinary humans. Then if anything extraordinary (I can’t quite let go of more) is to come of us, it comes by surprise, from outside, as grace abundantly offered and not by our own frenzies.

I’d go on. But for now, this seems just good enough.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.