Node Glue

Well, the kids’ gigantic playground structure arrived a couple of days ago from Costco. Here’s a picture of the “project scope”.

This thing arrived in seven heavy boxes of boards and bolts. And I’m guessing it will take about forty hours to assemble.

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you’ll know that the real challenge in front of me here isn’t the structure. It’s calling it good at each progessive stage of incompleteness until it’s done.

So, here’s the status report, in a picture.

Looks like a substantial piece, eh? Actually, my part was simply attaching the four wooden steps for the ladder on the left, the rest was preassembled About ninety minutes of work, with my five and three year old boys “helping” with the power drill.

So where’s the good here?

I got started on the project. Good.

We’re four steps closer to a playground. Good.

I did it with my boys. Good.

As I’ve wrestled with Perfectionism, and reflected upon how best practices like GTD have the potential of either cursing or blessing me, I’ve contemplated the words “Good Enough.” Can I just do something Good Enough without demanding Perfection?

And then it occurred to me that there’s something inherently wrong with mitigating Perfection with Good Enough. The trouble is that the two ideas are cut from the same cloth. So it does me little good to cover one with the other.

Good Enough is a euphemism for “it could be better,” or “it isn’t all that bad,” or “it could be worse,” or “it’s the best that could be done under the circumstances.” In all cases, the focus is not on the Good but on what’s Enough. And it leaves Good lacking, and asking, “what is Enough?”

I’ve realized lately that I have a hard time calling something good. “Good” to me means “three out of five stars,” with a particularly painful awareness of the two empty ones. (What is Enough?)
And then I remembered this:

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God divided the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:3-4).

When God creates, he calls things good that are not even yet complete. He was already using that word to describe His work after the first day of Creation, even before it was ready to host mankind. I rarely feel free to use that word, even after pouring myself out obsessively in pursuit of perfection.

God rested after six days of doing good. I never rest no matter what I do.

At best, I may say, “that’s good…BUT!” (But what?)
When God says, “it’s good,” He means “this is beneficial–this is delightful to me.” There’s no, “delightful…BUT”. It’s just good.

I tend to fixate on the two empty stars, and not only call the emptiness bad, but shameful. As if incompleteness were shameful. And that therefore something that is incomplete cannot, by definition, be good. Add to that the observation that nothing is ever complete, and you’ve completed a vicious cycle of mental bondage that shames, and robs me of the simple satisfaction of a Good Thing.

Nick Duffill weighs in on my GTD In the Grip post with some insightful comments that resonate very deeply with me. In particular, I relate to the ambivalence articulated by the statement statement below about how we create comfortable frameworks that we love to hate and cannot tear ourselves away from. ouch. Thanks, Nick.

For most people, habits that constrain performance are a comfortable framework that we love to hate and cannot tear ourselves away from. By adopting habits that have a predictable outcome, we have exercised a choice, and we prefer predictability over uncertainty. Even if we continually say we want to change and will change, only one or two members of the committee in our heads is actually convinced, and the silent majority still exercise their veto. This is perhaps the reason that changes in habit and approach arise from life-changing traumas and events - it takes something of that magnitude to actually enforce a change.

Since adopting GTD, I have learned to live with a to-do list that could keep me occupied for the next two to five years. I luxuriate in thinking that this is a bad thing and that I am failing to make significant progress each week, but in reality it’s not like that. By taking action, I am taking decisions - deciding to do one task in a hundred and leave the other 99 unattended. Instead of beating myself up for failing to also complete the other 99 actions, I can tell myself that I chose not to do them. If they were truly important, I would have done them. Actions speak louder than words.

I haven’t landed any tricks on a skateboard in ages, but recently, my four year old son, Henry, has shown a great interest in skateboarding. So somewhat unusually for me, I decided to be a little spontaneous last night and went out and got skateboards for both of us so we could skate together. So here’s a photo of me getting some air time! Look closely enough at my shirt for proof that I was at Seattle Mind Camp

And here’s me and Henry with our boards.

My two year old son, Martin, got a four wheeler ride-on to keep up with me and Henry.

I’ll be at mindcamp2.0 this weekend. I’m stoked about this, because initially, I didn’t think I was going to get to go, but then I got lucky!