Last week was the first week of school. Justin pointed out the night before the first day that it was the “first day of the last year of elementary school.” And he was having big, big feelings about it.
Those feelings came to a head on Thursday. We had to wake him up (he usually comes bouncing out of his room right on time, or even early). He was emotional from the jump and it just accelerated. When he got on the bus we saw him bury his teary eyed face in his hands. We texted his teachers to tell them he was coming in hot.
Sure enough, a couple of hours later I got a call from the school. His EC teacher (who supports Justin’s classroom teacher) was on the line. I expected to hear all about how things had fallen apart completely. Maybe even that he needed to come home.
Instead she confirmed that yes, he had been emotional. And during morning gathering for his class, he had nearly lost it. He ran from the circle, but this time instead of running away or melting down she said that he stood behind his desk and she could hear him saying to himself “breathe, breathe, breathe. You are panicking. It is okay. Breathe.” She was so proud of him. So are we. So much work, so much therapy. So much time spent reminding him that autism makes hard things harder, but that he is not his struggles, and that he can do hard things.
As I talked to Justin’s teacher I was standing near where I keep my notebooks. There are a lot. I was staring at the notebook that keeps my to-do list. I like to have an always open physical reminder of what I need to get done.
Part of that comes from years in the Army, where everything—from the maintenance schedule on a Humvee to the minute-by-minute timeline of a training exercise—is planned, tracked, and measured. I was told constantly (and was eventually the one saying) that if you don’t manage the details then the details manage you. Part of it is just who I am: a stay-at-home dad and caregiver trying to keep household logistics, appointments, meals, and family routines from flying off the rails.
My default setting has always been forward momentum. I prefer order. I like a clean counter, an empty inbox, a completed task, and a day that feels like it added up to something substantial.
But life rarely consults my notebook.
My to-do list could’ve been derailed had Justin’s day gone just a little differently. When I was in the hospital this summer, all the best laid plans blew up. There was no order, no sense of control. Instantly, the schedule vanished. The writing draft, the grocery run, the emails I promised I’d send, the chores I had carefully lined up—gone.
My immediate reaction was frustration and disappointment. Look at everything that isn’t getting done. My brain went straight into tactical crisis mode: How do I fix this? How can I help manage the chaos from my hospital bed?
I confess that the drama with Justin took me out of my routine and headspace. Justin definitely handled it all better than I did. By 2:00 PM, I had achieved almost nothing on my list. The kitchen sink had dishes in it. The laundry sat half-folded on the armchair. I was wearing the clothes I had planned on changing, sitting on the couch, playing video games and hoping that Justin would come home in a better mood.
I felt a familiar, creeping shame: the feeling that the day was a total write-off, a failure of planning, energy, and will.
Later that night Barb and I were watching TV. Justin was in bed asleep. Liz was in her room gaming with friends online. The dog was curled up in her bed near the couch. The house was quiet. Everyone was safe, fed, and warm.
I had to ask myself: What, exactly, failed here?
The Tyranny of the Optimized Day
We live in a culture obsessed with optimization. Open your phone or walk into any bookstore, and you will find an endless parade of advice telling you how to win the morning, maximize your output, habit-stack your way to enlightenment, and get 10 pounds of productivity from a 5 pound bag.
We have been conditioned to believe that a day only counts if it produces a visible artifact: a finished project, a clean garage, an impressive metric, or a breakthrough conversation.
If we have a low-output day—a day consumed by sick kids, medical insurance company calls, physical or emotional exhaustion, or even just the heavy gravity of being human—we treat it like a moral failure. We call it “wasted time.”
In the military, when conditions on the ground change dramatically, you don’t keep executing the original attack plan just because it looked pretty on a map. You issue a fragmentary order—a FRAGO. You adjust to the terrain in front of you. You secure the perimeter, assess casualties, and protect your people. You redefine what mission success looks like under current conditions.
Yet in our personal lives, we rarely give ourselves permission to issue a FRAGO. We demand pristine, peak-performance results on days when the weather is terrible, the ground is giving way beneath our feet, and our avenue of approach is overgrown and impassable.
The Standard of “Good Enough”
A while back, I wrote about the idea of doing nothing—how sometimes the most important, sacred thing we can do for someone we love is not fixing their problem, but simply sitting with them in their discomfort.
The “Good-Enough” day is how we can operationalize the notion of sacred, relational, and counter-cultural space.
A good-enough day is not an excuse for apathy or laziness. It is an intentional act of situational awareness. It is looking at high-friction circumstances and choosing to make an adjustment to the pass/fail criteria.
On a good-enough day, success looks entirely different:
Everyone is fed (even if dinner is frozen waffles).
The necessary medications are taken on time. Or almost on time.
You do not lose your temper when things go sideways. Or if you do, you repair the breach and move forward.
You keep the environment calm enough for someone to rest. Whether it’s you or someone else.
You made it to bedtime in one piece. Or few enough pieces you can hold them together.
That is not a failed day. That is a holding action. In tactical terms, a holding action is what allows you to survive until reinforcements arrive or conditions improve. In family life and physical/mental health, a holding action is what keeps burnout from turning into complete systemic collapse.
Dropping the Invisible Backpack
Most of the exhaustion we feel at the end of a hard day doesn’t actually come from the tasks we did. It comes from the invisible backpack of guilt we carried while doing them.
We spend energy taking care of a family crisis, but we double the tax on our nervous system by constantly reminding ourselves of what we should have been doing instead. We nurse resentment against the day itself for not conforming to our wishes.
The Stoics had a straightforward rule about this: divide the world into what is within your control and what is not. You cannot control when you get sick or your kid with autism gets overwhelmed. You cannot control when a piece of bad news hits your inbox. You can’t control Donald Trump’s latest post, or earthquakes, or floods, or climate change. You cannot control the days when your own body, mind, or soul simply hits a wall.
What you can control is your definition of victory for that day.
When you surrender the fantasy of the ideal day, you make room for the reality of the necessary day. You stop treating disruptions as interruptions to your “real” life, and you start recognizing that navigating disruptions with patience and gentleness is the real life.
Crossing the Finish Line
Tonight, the kitchen may not be spotless. The newsletter draft might be half-finished, and the to-do list might look almost identical to the way it looked when the sun came up.
And.
If everyone in your house is safe, if kindness won out over panic, and if you made space for someone to catch their breath—or caught your own—you didn’t waste today. You defended the line. You held space.
Close the notebook. Turn off the light. Call it a win.
Tomorrow is a brand-new day with a fresh map. But tonight, good enough is plenty.
May it ever be so.
Thank you for this. The combination of your experience with your current insight is really powerful.
Thank you, Jeff. Love to all of you!