What good does it do to be good enough?

The amount of time (not money) I spend searching for the right notepad is unbelievable. Ever since those unpicky pre-teen years I had to settle with just the right kind of “my dear diary”. Anything just wouldn’t do. Anything too pretty wouldn’t work because I would be worried that a mere act of writing would somehow ruin it. Anything too fancy wouldn’t do either. I would be intimidated by its silent expectations and terrified that my gibberish would just be not good enough. The notepad always had to have this feel of just rightness so I could relax and start writing in it.

  “Not good enough” is some sort of a curse, isn’t it?
Even though I definitely wasn’t raised Catholic (heaven forbid, I was born at the times when kids attended Communist parades with plastic flowers in their hands), the concept of unexplained guilt was there. The lurking shadow of the Evil Leprechaun telling me I’m not good enough was there. Was it a handy disciplinary tool (most likely) some part of the family used and then the other part of the family spent years to undo (the most impossible mission)? I’m not entirely sure.

I was reading about Henry David Thoreau today. The man who escaped from his noisy family to the cabin in the woods of Massachusetts. Not to save the world, not to inspire all generations of hippies. The dude just needed some quality time to unwind and write. What came out of this retreat is a thick rather boastful (this is Thoreau’s verbiage) book called “Walden” (1854). A hymn to the time spent well, spent wisely in the company of the most companionable companion in the world, the solitude.
What a dream, eh? I would dissolve into pure joy if I could spend some time in the rustic little cabin writing something decent (heck, even the cabin fever could be a source of inspiration!). This is very old school, I know. Imagine myself without Wikipedia, scrambling my facts around and putting endless asterisks to “double check this and that”… I’m very jealous of Thoreau’s perfect writing haven, which becomes yet another ally of that evil Not-Good-Enough Leprechaun.

It takes a whole lot to find your own voice and your own story. I wonder if this harsh “it’s not good enough” is a cruel blessing in disguise. Is it a wishful thinking or yet another disguise for the fear of rejection and legalization of laziness? The truth is out there.

The good thing is that I finally got a notepad which is good enough.