Good enough...

Okay, so an hour ago I found out I have 48 hours until my "handoff" meeting. 

That seemed do-able.  Still does - don't know why I wrote in the past tense!

Put together a macro-punch list of what still needs to be done, and put together a schedule to try and get it done.  (Yoda on my shoulder (he's heavy, by the way) : NO! Try not! Do or do not! There is no try!)

And try and be reasonable and realistic and plan in breaks and other life events.  I cannot - and will not - spend the next forty-eight hours on this project.  (Forty-six now...)

I realize my biggest issue with this project is letting go, and recognizing when it is "good enough". 

"Good enough" is a really hard concept to accept.  There's always a tweak that can make it better.  Letting go, though, and recognizing that something or someone or some event or some whatever is good enough is really tough.  I want to be able to say I did my best, but "good enough" is rarely one's best.  So, I qualify and instead will say, "I did the best I could given the... " whatever comes next refers to limitations.  And even that, sometimes, is not true.  But I have to believe it, and I have to let go.

It is hard for me to realize, and easier for others to see for me, that sometimes my "good enough" is still much better than many people's "best"s and that is even more reason why I should be able to accept "good enough". 

You can see that I am still trying to convince myself. 

But this is an ongoing struggle on a much larger level.  It is a circular fight.  At some level, we have to give ourselves permission to be human, and to not be perfect, and to accept that we do, generally, do the best that we can given the circumstances.  We do this in parenting, we do this in our relationships with others, we do this at work, we do this in keeping commitments.  But sometimes we give ourselves too much permission to not bring our best to the table.  To not give our best.  To instead spread ourselves so thin, to create circumstances, where we have to accept "good enough". 

It is a double-edged sword "good enough".

I brought in Yoda above partly as a joke, but I think his comment addresses a broader issue.  Sometimes we need to just do.  There is no trying.  And sometimes, we need to change the circumstances that prevent us from doing.  In wanting to get the correct exact line, I googled it, and re-watched 44 seconds of the scene from which it comes.  In the scene from Empire Strikes Back where Yoda is instructing the young Jedi that he is what prevents himself from raising the X-wing fighter that has sunk into the morass,

"So certain are you? *sigh* Always with you what cannot be done.  Do you nothing that I say?" Luke tells him that moving stones around is one thing, that this huge thing is totally different. 

Yoda says, "No.  No different.  Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned."

And that's when Luke says he'll give it a try. 

What often keeps us from getting things done is ourselves.  Whether it is accepting actually good work as "good enough" or believing that the circumstances around us really prevent us from doing something the way we think it should or could be done. 

This is a rambling post, with some real potential in it for great thoughts.  But the current circumstance is that the time I allotted for a break is over.  So this will have to be "good enough" to provoke some thought from you and from me about how we approach getting done what we need to get done.  And how we let go of the things we have done. 

It's one big circle, and I am already dizzy thinking about it... ;)

 P.S.  Hit 5,000 hits last night.  Thanks all!  Keep reading!