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Good Enough
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of
Edmonton, April 19, 2005
I come in praise of mediocrity!
I stand to celebrate the average!
I speak in favour of the unremarkable!
I give the deepest bow to the ‘good ole college try’!
Well, okay, perhaps I’m not here to praise those
things exactly, but I do think these are qualities that have been
given too much of a bum rap over the years. The media in our world
are much too focused on the competitive and adversarial model. Winners
are celebrated (and then hounded by the tabloids). Losers only get
TV time for the few moments when the cameras can capture them demonstrating
the ‘agony of defeat’. They are then quickly forgotten,
until they surface again years later as one of the tougher questions
in a trivia game. “I’ll take Famous Losers for $2,000,
Alex.”
The fact is that there are darn few of us who will ever be the
best at anything. My only ‘best’ came in grade one where
I got the medal for best grades in the winter term. But that was
only because the girl who was the real winner was going to be out
sick for the next two months and they wanted the medallist in the
classroom.
As I look around the room I don’t see anyone wearing championship
sports rings, or Order of Canada lapel pins. Not too many of us
are about to stand up and chant, “I am the greatest,”
along with Muhammed Ali. The fact is that most of us are reasonably
average people. Maybe we are a little better than some in one category
and a little worse in others, but the overall grade point average
will probably put most of us in the middle of the pack of the human
race. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But somewhere along the line our competitive and capitalist society
has infused us with a message that being just okay at what we do
and how we live is not good enough. You should not be satisfied
with good enough, you must excel!!! You are somehow less than adequate
if you drive a five-year old car (or don’t even HAVE a car!)
or if you can’t afford Mexico every winter or have to shop
at discount stores. Ah, well no on that last one. They advertise
too. If you shop there they tell you how smart you are. I’ll
leave you to decide that one.
I am not often offended, but some years ago the No Fear apparel
company managed to deeply offend and anger me. It wasn’t their
No Fear gear itself, no, but the tee shirt that read, “Runner
up is first loser”. It incensed me because it made the very
act of competition obscene. To compete, to test oneself against
others should be a healthy thing, but to disdainfully proclaim that
there is only one winner and the rest must be branded as losers
perverts the very point of competition. I understand that particular
clothing item was banned in some schools, and where it wasn’t
banned, it made good discussion material for social studies classes.
Now I like competition. Don’t get me wrong. I have always
enjoyed competitive sports and do try to find ways to measure myself
against some kind of standard in much that I do. A healthy approach
to competition can sharpen skills and help you push yourself into
accomplishing more than you might have thought possible. The trick
is realizing from the start that you might not be the best, and
that the very act of trying to compete counts for a great deal.
Or perhaps, the trick is learning that there is no shame in not
coming first or even in failing completely.
I love watching TV cooking shows. Sometimes I try to recreate the
meals I see. I know I can’t balance flavours the same way
a professional chef can, or get the plate looking quite as pretty,
but most times when I try it turns out pretty well. Taking on those
challenges have made me a better cook. Well, that’s today.
I have fond memories of a French loaf we used as a cricket bat and
a few other dishes that went straight into the garbage. But hey,
that’s why God made TV dinners.
But here’s the key. I enjoy trying, and while I like to succeed,
I don’t have to win every time. I don’t have to get
it right every time. I just have to get it right enough, often enough
to want to try again.
There is a great gap between being competitive and having to be
the best. If our society has a problem with competition it comes
not from the contest, but from setting unreasonable expectations
for success, and unreasonable shame-based penalties for failure.
Unreasonable expectations add unnecessary stress to our lives.
That stress can sap the joy out of much that we do. It can even
kill you. The great Green Bay football coach Vince Lombardi is remembered
for saying to his team, “Winning isn’t everything…it’s
the only thing!” He died young, at the peak of his coaching
career. Was it his obsession with victory and perfection? I can’t
say with confidence, but I can be suspicious.
Unreasonable shame-based penalties for failure are another matter
entirely. Some of them are imposed by a culture that idolizes winners
and forgets the rest of the pack. But most of those penalties come
from within. I have known a number of driven winner focused people
in my life. Some have had demanding parents, for others the drive
came from inside or from some other direction. The one thing they
had in common was a pervasive sense of shame when they failed…
or even when they just didn’t succeed as well as they thought
they should. A few have had enough balance in their lives to savour
their victories, but many have achieved their goals and found only
an empty feeling, like they had missed something along the way.
And a few have fallen short of what they thought they could achieve
and have punished themselves to a ridiculous extent…runner
up is first loser.
The fact is that everyone loses sooner or later. Most of us learn
this very basic lesson early in life and are able to cope with it.
For some the playground lessons about losing can be brutal and scarring.
I certainly understand the people bearing those wounds who want
no part of competition.
But the people who learn about losing only much later in life have
just as hard a time. In many professional sports now there are counseling
services provided for athletes nearing the ends of their careers.
For a true star who has always had the limelight from grade school
onward, who has been given scholarships and cars and big bonuses
and as many sexual partners as they can handle, stepping into real
life can be a traumatic experience. More than a few wind up in substance
abuse situations. More than a few end in jail.
Everyone of us has some broken dreams in the background of our
lives. Some of those dreams were the simple stuff of childhood and
can be let go without too much pain. It didn’t take me too
many years in football to realize that I would never win the Grey
Cup, nor did it take me long to realize that I would never get that
first place school medal back again.
Like most folks I found ways to recast my dreams as I matured.
I learned to let go of the more outlandish fantasies and pick goals
I could achieve. I found satisfactions in things other than ‘winning’…or
perhaps I redefined ‘winner’ in a less conventional
way. Winning can mean first place. Or it can mean being comfortable
with who you are, with what you look like, with what you weigh,
with what you do for a living, with your own foibles and weaknesses.
You see, most of us average folks are good enough.
This all came to me in a blinding revelation one day in university.
I had gone back to complete an undergraduate degree in my early
thirties. I was hoping to go to Divinity School. Fact is I struggled
to achieve C+ grades in my first year. I grew a bit frustrated,
especially when I watched 19 year-olds beating my grades six ways
to Sunday. I wondered how I could do better. But then I looked at
the younger history students who were stars and saw two things.
First, a good many confined their learning only to what the professor
wanted to get back on exams and papers. I was having far too much
fun absorbing and speculating about the material to follow that
path. Some of them were merely studying. I was learning. I don’t
mean to sound smug, but I think these are different things. My Dad
used to say that the purpose of university was not to make you smart,
but to teach you to think. I like to believe I followed his good
advice. It was the benefit of being a mature student. Too often
I gave the professors my ideas, not a rehashing of theirs. Only
once did it help my grades…when I wrote a social history of
baseball for another fanatic.
Secondly, the star students sacrificed too many of the good things
in their lives in order to get their grades. I wasn’t a party
animal or anything…well at least not when I went back to my
school in my thirties…, but I wasn’t prepared to make
school and grades the end all and be all of existence. Fortunately
the educators of ministers looked for more than good grades, so
I didn’t have as much pressure as many of my student colleagues.
But maybe the pressure wasn’t there because ministry is one
line where winning is not the ultimate goal.
It sorrows me deeply to hear that since my day 20 years ago, graduate
schools have gotten even more competitive, and that college kids
today are being forced away from learning to think in quest of the
almighty GPA. True learning, true thinking has melted away from
too many undergraduate programs.
At any rate I found myself formulating an axiom that still guides
my life today. It takes more work to get from A to A+ than it took
to get to A in the first place. And then factoring in the Law of
Diminishing Returns I decided there was a corollary: The amount
of work it takes to get from A to A+ is inversely proportional to
the amount of joy you can get out of life. My inevitable conclusion?
A or even B were darn fine grades and more than good enough, especially
when it meant I could still enjoy the rest of what life has to offer.
I didn’t even mind the occasional C when I felt satisfied
with my own efforts.
You know, there is nothing wrong with just plain liking yourself
as you are and for who you are and for what you are capable of doing.
Too many of the cultural messages today tell us we aren’t
good enough, young enough, skinny enough, pretty enough, smart enough,
rich enough, fast enough, cool enough, healthy enough and tall enough.
Well enough is enough! And it’s all such a steaming load of
fertilizer.
You know I have the privilege of knowing something about the lives
of many of the people in this church. I can tell you two things.
No one here has a perfect life. No one here scores A+ on everything.
And you know what? Most of us are generally pretty happy with our
lots.
Sure there have been broken dreams. Most lives hold many small
ones and a few great whopping black as night busted dreams. But
we suffer them and we grow through them. We learn from them, not
for the purpose of getting an A on some exam, but to the end of
finding a way to keep on living as joyfully as we can. And then
mostly we move along. Sometimes they make us stronger. Sometimes
they teach us to appreciate what we do have. But we all have them.
Heartbreak is part of being an ordinary, average person living and
ordinary, average lives.
In a part of the reading I did not share, Tom Owen-Towle offers
two quotes. “Johnny tells us: I’m less interested in
beating my opponents than in meeting my own personal standards for
achievement, enjoyment, and growth. The sound of cheering within
is what I hunger for.” And then “I recently read in
a runner’s magazine a male long-distance runner’s comment:
I have only one goal left – not to break my personal records
or race some distance or place I’ve never gone before. My
goal now is simply to become and old runner.”
It’s an easy thing for me to say, but a darned hard thing
for many of you to accept, but I will say it anyway in closing:
You…are good enough.
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