Doing the Best You Can, With What You Have...

As I have sometimes alluded to, I was raised in a household that valued "always doing your best" very highly.

There might be a lot of things from my upbringing that I have ignored, but that particular value has always stuck with me, sometimes to my detriment.

Of course, one of the bitter/unpleasant realizations in life is that "doing our best" often means completely different things to different people. And sometimes our own "best" turns out to not stack up all that well against some global metric we might not even have been aware of.

Short version: We learn that we actually suck at something we thought we were pretty good at.

For much of my life, I have been aware that "my best" is often fenced in — at least to some degree — by "available resources.".. or the lack of available resources, to be more precise.

And that's the thing, isn't it?

Doing our best often means doing so, with what we have available. And that might be hopelessly insufficient to make much difference in the world of whatever-it-is-we're-trying-to-do.

It is — for example — a situation I have often faced with gardening. For most of my life, I was never able to afford fancy tools, improved soils or expensive plants.

So I had to approach the experience from the perspective of doing my best, with what I had, which often meant working with rough native soils and adding whatever organic matter I could get my hands on... and then spending a lot of my time weeding because the soil invariably was full of seeds.

Not really very much I could do about it, because buying 20 bags of "clean" topsoil was not an option. And the seeds I'd plant were most likely harvested, rather than commercial... so there was a high percentage of "duds" that never germinated.

I thought myself a pretty good gardener, but my efforts were quite modest, compared to neighbors who were spending $1000s on their immaculate pieces of land.

My experience with art was similar, in many ways. I had to work with limited supplies, and whatever I could find at thrift stores. In a sense, that still holds true, as my art is rarely income producing but it still has to be self-funding.

Building things? Has to be done with scraps and leftovers, and whatever might be available on the "Buy Nothing" web site. Recently, I was able to get my hands on some discarded fencing I can use to build more raised beds with.

Upcycling is a worthy endeavor.

Perhaps the important thing to remember in all this is that it's best not to compare ourselves, and whatever it is we consider to be "our best."

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024-03-03 02:02 PST
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