It's time to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good

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There are countless ways that I let perfect be the enemy of good, or as I often bastardize it: perfection be the enemy of good-enough. Every day it seems, I’m confronted with new examples of how a certain habit towards inflexibility or idealism can leave me with less than I started with.

Take for example, swimming. For ten years I have lived a mere stone’s throw from a naturally spring-fed historic outdoor lido which is both quite cold and completely unchlorinated (chemical free in fact). Over the same duration of time I have lamented how little I get to swim because of how little wild water we have in Derbyshire (we have a lot of limestone here which doesn’t hold water, and what we have is often overcrowded or worse – heavily polluted. We have reservoirs, but I’m also a rule-player. If a sign says no, and if the sign plays into my own fears of being mangled in submerged machinery, then I don’t ignore the sign. I don’t especially like this part of me, but look, there are bigger problems to deal with). Common sense would dictate that while a lido is different from swimming free in a lake, a river, or the sea, it is at least clean, spring fed water. It is at least cold. It is close by. But for ten years, not being able to achieve the perfect solution meant that I didn’t even try the lido. What would be the point when it’s not perfect?

Well, this week in a bid to clear up my own most persistent obstacles (hello, therapist) and missing my daily swims in the mountain streams of Val Taleggio, I decided that I really should try the lido at least once. And you can imagine how that went, right? I had a great time, I swam a load of lengths, I got the endorphin hit that I was craving from cold water, and I signed myself over to an annual membership that will give me unlimited access throughout the year. Friends, I could have done this many years ago and been a calmer person. But I didn’t, because the pool isn’t perfect, and in doing so I have denied myself a decade of good-enough. A good-enough that left me feeling great for days after, helped me sleep better, and left me feeling all crisp and clarified in mind and spirit. In rejecting good enough, I was parched and desperate – demonstrably worse off. As I say, I wish I could claim this was a rare occurrence, but it isn’t.