“I want it all,” sang Queen, Bruce Springsteen, High School Musical, and many others. “Never settle” has 6.7 million hits on Google. “All or Nothing” is the title of pop songs, movies, books, and musicals. People say “I want adventure” and “I don’t want an ordinary life.” Hollywood tells us to go for broke and shoot the moon. But is this good advice?“
Almost always, it’s a recipe for disaster. Instead, follow these three commandments:
Revel in the miracle of ordinary life;
Remember that Good is Good Enough; and
Enjoy what you have.
Revel in the miracle of ordinary life.
The most profound adventures and most profound beauties are those almost too ordinary to notice. Life’s treasures are like the shadows of grass. Subtle and small, they lie dark at one’s feet, waiting only for the distracted eye to notice. “The power of finding beauty in the humblest things,” said Louisa May Alcott, “makes home happy and life lovely.” The deepest dreams are those behind the lives we live each day. Often the most profound art is about the meaning of small things: the weight of a handkerchief or the tang of smoke. I once spent an hour looking closely at the thousand nuanced hues of a square inch of live oak. That attention to and love for the most mundane of tiny fragments of this world brought me to a place of peace, a place where the worldscent was one of beauty and quiet goodness. Anyone who has seen a child’s face when blowing on a dandelion knows how small children take exquisite delight in the tiniest of things. We feel love most fully in the small things of a shared life—the crease in the leather chair where she sits; the tattered hat he wears on rainy days; the blanket we wrapped ourselves in when we made up stories together; the cups we sipped from, catsnuggly in silence; or laughing in the long golden light of afternoon.
It’s easy to lose sight of this. Thousands of words are written about how to “keep the spark alive” in a relationship. What they miss is not just a spark but true fireworks. My wife is good wife and a real companion, and that is why my heart fills with joy every time I look at her. Sharing ordinary life with a good person IS magic. No “spark” can compare with the torrent of quiet light in which each simple moment of shared life is bathed. Why can’t people see that? To truly share with someone the sheer wonder of washing dishes, of a smudge on the face of your sleeping child, of tired hands after a long day—how can we not cherish that as a profound and amazing gift? Yes, my heart leaps when she comes home from work. But that’s just the decorative rose in the icing. No one would order a plateful of decorative roses or turn their nose up at a delicious cake that didn’t have decorative roses.
Revere the quiet moments. We define our lives by their pauses, the fleeting or lengthy stretches of same in an arcade of flickering small changes. It is when nothing is happening that we truly inhabit ourselves.The truly level-headed person is the one who exults in the tiny anomalies of ordinary life.
It’s so easy to overlook the blessings of ordinary life. So, make a habit, at the end of the day or another convenient time, to list in your mind at least three beautiful ordinary things in your life. The way your husband snores, the way your kid always gets icing on their chin when they eat cake, the wrinkles in your mother’s hand. Rejoice in the wonder of an eyelash to be kissed. Celebrate the glory of old shoes.
Be happy with what you have.
Whether you are rich or poor, whatever you have is tiny compared to what you don’t have. The Emmerson family owns 2.4 million acres of land. But the earth has over 36 billion acres of land. Emperor Akbar was said to have 500 wives in his harem, but how many more women were there in the world, even in the 1500’s? So you can always keep trying to get more, which is a losing battle, or you can be content with less. As I always told my kids, you have a choice: you can be unhappy about what you don’t have or you can be happy about what you do have. Seneca said “A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” Rabbi Hyman Schlechter reminded us that “happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.” (Dale Carnegie put it as “happiness is wanting what you get.”) This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work toward your goals or try to improve your life. It does mean you should value, cherish, and enjoy the life you have now. If you are studying hard to be a doctor, enjoy the studying. Appreciate the calm red grin of sunset through the window. We all like to complain sometimes. I’ve always thought that a bit of complaining is good for the soul, provided you keep in mind how lucky you are to have things to complain about. My garage door opener won’t work. It will cost money to fix and meanwhile I have to get out of the car in the rain and open the door manually. But I have a house and a car and, inside, a wife and children who love me. The raindrops outside are miniscule compared to the river of joy I can allow myself to feel.
This is something of which we need continually to remind ourselves. Make a list of all the good things in your life to be grateful for, the things worth cherishing and appreciating. They don’t have to be perfect things or remarkable things. I never realized, when I was young and healthy, what a lovely thing it is to wake up in the morning without pain. So make a list and keep it handy. Whenever you feel yourself getting upset about something that isn’t truly life-shattering, re-read you list. Then make an effort to tell someone why you feel lucky they are in your life.
And remember something I always tell my kids and, even more often, myself: If you can’t appreciate what you have, you deserve to lose it.
Good Is Good Enough
Perfection is the enemy of happiness. Elliott Cohen has said “there is no such thing as perfection in this imperfect world and…when you demand that you attain it, you are in for a life of frustration and high-level stress.” “Only the best” has destroyed many a marriage. You have a good husband, a decent and responsible man who loves you. He doesn’t read your mind. He’s got a bit of a pot belly. He’s only one man. You can hunt for more men. You can complain that he leaves up the toilet seat or doesn’t anticipate your desires. Or you can enjoy and cherish what you have. He’s not perfect. Nothing is. He doesn’t have everything on your wish list. But good is good enough. I’m not saying “bad is good enough”—if he hits you or gambles away the rent money, that’s definitely not good enough. What I’m saying flies in the face of Hollywood wisdom. “Never settle” and “I deserve the best,” are common mantras in American society. But they are recipes for disaster. (After all, there are 8 billion people on earth, so the odds are that you’re not the very best, or even close. Even if you’re better than 99% of people, there are still 80 million people better than you.) If you’re a professional athlete or a concert pianist, where the competition is unbelievably fierce, it may make sense never to be satisfied and always to strive for more, because anything else means you’re going to fall behind. A Major League pitcher has to strike out Willie Mays. But you’re not going to be sent back to the minors if you get an A- on a test. Your wife shouldn’t be “cut from the team” if she’s only a passable dancer or spends her career in middle management. The idea of tolerance–that an acceptable range is good enough–is what made modern industry possible. Psychology, ethics, management, and economics all talk about satisficing–seeking an acceptable rather than the best solution.* Ask yourself “what can I really not live with? What would I really like but can live without? What are good things that I already have” And be reasonable about answering these questions. Your “dealbreakers” shouldn’t be petty or unrealistic.
I’ve always felt fondness for the Japanese idea of Wabi Sabi, a phrase difficult to translate but which reminds us to accept and even celebrate imperfection. Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery, emphasizes rather than hides the cracks, repaired with decorative gold and silver infused lacquer. Life is impermanent and imperfect, as Heraclitus reminds us when he says “you can’t step in the same river twice.”
But shouldn’t we always try to improve? Shouldn’t we always try to do better? Shouldn’t morality, at least, demand the best from us? Shelly Kagan argues that there aren’t limits on our obligation to promote the good. I’ll give you three reasons for thinking morality should settle for good enough: the diversity argument, the bad parent argument, and the beauty of ruins.
A good motto is: strive for the best but be content with good enough. Try for the A, but be happy with a B+. Say “I’d like to do better and I’ll try but I’m not going to drive myself crazy about it.” Susan Wolfe says she’s glad that, if there are any moral saints, “neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them.” Personally, I wouldn’t mind being friends with a Gandhi. Gandhi led India to independence not through arms but by moral example. He refused to end a hunger strike until the Sikhs and Moslems of Calcutta not only eschewed violence but put aside hatred in their hearts. I will never approach the moral standard of a Gandhi. But it is good to have a world with many kinds of moral beauty, many sorts of good lives, not just the best, not just Gandhi-sized moral excellence, but smaller acts of goodness, lesser reflections of human potential. A Strauss Waltz can’t compare to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, but it would be a worse world without Waltzes. No one life can realize the incredibly diverse forms of human goodness. Some are better than others, but all human goodness has something to offer. So a world with many types of good lives, greater and lesser, is a richer world. So don’t forget to celebrate what you accomplished. Remember that, for most people, a happy life is a life of balance, which means a time comes to put away the violin, or the dance shoes, or the spreadsheet, and relax. Enjoy the glory of a quiet cup of tea and the lazy stretch of sunlight, the delicious brilliance of doing nothing.
After all, the demanding parent who chastises a child for getting a 99% instead of a 100%, or who says “next time do better” to a child who comes in second in a field of 500, is a terrible parent. The child deserves to be praised and celebrated for those accomplishments, not diminished. Morality is not a bad parent, telling a good person “that’s not enough—you could do even better.” While morality smiles on excellence, it is content with good enough. Moral heroes are great, but so are ordinary decent folk. Likewise, don’t be a terrible parent to yourself or to other people. Appreciate the real, if less than perfect, good things about yourself, your partner, you workmates, your neighbors, and everyone else.
Human beings are not angels—thank goodness. The landscape of mortality is a landscape of ruins. The human world is not a world of perfect shapes and pristine colors. It is a world of ruins and shadows, dappled sunlight and jagged edges. We are mortal. Our bodies die a little every day, and even the best trained bodies are rampant with imperfections we would never tolerate in a toaster. A perfect world is not a human world. Angels, perhaps, have perfect wings and live forever in tranquil contemplation. We know pain, disease, injustice, weakness, and the inevitable loss of everything we care about. And so we are lucky. We see, in the moss-limned outline of a ruined castle, both the absent perfect form and the blazing particularity of the crumbling, irregular stone. We feel both the pain and the glory of constant loss. And in a perfect world, there is no laughter: laughter requires imperfection and an intellect that perceives it, recognizes itself, and knows better. Slapstick is not funny to someone who has never fallen. We know these special joys and beauties no angel can appreciate. We watch an icicle slowly dripping away in the sun, and it is poignant and beautiful. Angels never know the special joy of almost overcoming an insuperable obstacle. Angels never know the special joy of coming to peace with one’s mistakes and shortcomings, of looking back, as one lies dying, at both the opportunities lost and the small ways in which one’s life has made someone, something, somewhere, a little better, and saying, in a wheezing, gasping, breath, “all in all, it was a good thing.” I pity the angels, those pale creatures of perfection, who are forever shut out of the million tiny wonders of a mortal life.
Be happy with a life of beauty. Find beauty in all the small places it blooms. Live a life of love. You find true love not in fireworks and banners in the sky, but in all the tiny ways you take care of each other. Love generously but wisely. Love isn’t blind, but stupidity is. Life always grows its tiny gardens of delight. It is a short walk we take from birth to death. Cherish all the little charms along the way.
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*The term “satisficing” comes from Herbert Simon. Michael Slote and Philip Pettit discuss satisficing in ethical theory: https://www.princeton.edu/~ppettit/papers/1984/Satisficing%20Consequentialism.pdf
Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.
