Good enough

Someone asked me recently if I was a woodworker. I’m not.

Not in the sense of excellent work, learning all the skills, creating fine furniture-grade heirlooms to be treasured forever. But I do make things, from time to time, out of wood.

I watch shows with real woodworkers who create fine furniture-grade heirlooms, who remodel spaces with excellence, who are awesome. I learn a little each time.

Nancy and I have been staying in a cabin near the shore of Whitefish Bay. It is the kind of space that someone might demo and remodel with excellence. It is rustic.

However, I have the sense that it was a family cabin up north. It’s the kind of place called a “camp” on the east coast. It was built with the rounded outside of logs, roofed with tarpaper, windows with squares of glass and hand-made frames. The cabinets are built from logs, not at a factory that turns them out in climate -controlled log-cabin-look styles, but on site while waiting for the rain to stop.

The builder may have said “good enough”. But not in a disparaging way. Oh no. It was “good enough” in a “sufficient to get our family to the shore, our buddies to the fishing, our grandpa to the story-telling, our babies to the memories” way.

And in the “comfortable for a couple needing some R and R who don’t need fancy but need to be up north” kind of way.

When you are writing or building or creating or serving or cooking or any of a thousand things we do, don’t get so caught up in getting it perfect that we miss sufficient for the purpose it is being done.