I have needed to go to the Optometrist since COVID shut everything down two years ago. So it’s been 4 years. And by the headaches I get and the trouble I have focusing on my monitors every day, I can tell that, yes, I am indeed overdue. So I sit here and squeeze my eyes shut for a few seconds to try to get them to focus when I open them again. And I tip my chin up and then tuck it down to see if I can find a better spot between the top of the transition to the bottom of it that makes me better able to read what’s on my screen.

Then I just rub my eyes because I know I just need to go to the optometrist.

I just accept that I can’t read for as long, and I’ll just rest my eyes more, and I’ll just have a headache (or technically an eye-ache, I guess) at the end of every work day. And I can’t look at my phone if I also want to be able to refocus on the TV in the evening.
I’ll just settle for the lesser life because of this easily fixable problem. 
I have a bunch of excuses, of course. I don’t want someone’s face that close to mine, even if we’re both vaccinated and masked. I have to go when I have a chaperone because those eyedrops are a menace, and my chaperone works at work, so I need to go in the evening (except that the optometrist I’ve gone to in the past isn’t open in the evening, or on the weekend, and I don’t really want my weekend taken up with this kind of thing).

So I settle for the lesser life.

But as I sit here, settling, I’m thinking that there are probably other places in my life where I’m willing to just endure a crappy experience because I don’t want to do the work to make it better.

I mean, as a writer, there are lines that I’m always aware of – the Quality Bar, and the Good Enough Bar. There are times, especially in the last 2 years, where I’ve looked at my work and gone “Feh. Good enough. This is not the best work of my career, but it’s good enough.” It’s a legit thing when there are tradeoffs because of late additions to the To-Do list, and assorted other delays or over-packed days. But maybe notsomuch when you just have to make the appointment, and then… yaknow… *go*.

Its been easy to adopt a similar set of guardrails in other parts of my life, too. Floors are vacuumed but shelves are not dusted – good enough. The garden is watered but not weeded – that can wait. I’m sure I’d enjoy less sneezy days with less dust and I’d feel like I could enjoy my yard more if I wasn’t always looking around and seeing work to do.

During Lent, am I doing my due diligence of dutiful service, prayer and fasting, or am I just doing enough to check the checkbox? Good thing I have a Lent Project going on that helps me figure out that very thing, huh?
 

Extra Credit:

I’ve created landing pages for the last 3 years of Lent Project. You can access them from the Reflections Projects option in the menu bar. Happy reading, friends!