The Trouble With “Good Enough”

Sometimes “good enough” is wisdom. Sometimes it’s fear wearing a very sensible disguise.

The Shower That Didn’t Need Fixing

A few weeks ago, I stood in my bathroom staring at a shower that, by every reasonable measure, was perfectly acceptable.

It didn’t leak. It didn’t wobble. It still did the one thing showers are supposed to do—hold water where water is supposed to be held.

If you ignored the faded fiberglass, the brass trim that had survived several presidential administrations, and a soap dish that seemed to possess an uncanny ability to launch a bar of soap onto the floor, there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.

Which made tearing it out seem just a little irrational.

Most home improvement projects begin with excitement. Mine began with a conversation I had entirely with myself.

“You know,” I said, “this shower really ought to be updated.”

Another voice answered.

“Or…you could leave it alone.”

Looking back, that second voice was making a very persuasive case.

After all, I wasn’t fixing a problem.

I was creating one.

Within a day, the shower was gone. Then the drywall disappeared. Soon I was standing in a bathroom reduced to exposed studs, plumbing pipes, electrical wires, and enough construction dust to make me question every decision that had led me to that exact moment.

There is a point during every renovation when you stop thinking, This is going to look great, and start wondering if you’ll ever bathe indoors again.

I reached that point somewhere around waterproofing membrane number three.

What amused me wasn’t how difficult the project became.

It was how many times I caught myself thinking, The old shower was just fine.

That sentence stayed with me.

Not because of the bathroom.

Because I’d heard it before.

“The job is fine.”

“The house is fine.”

“We’ll travel next year.”

“Maybe someday.”

It’s amazing how often we settle for “fine” simply because it never asks us to explain why we stopped wanting more.

The older I get, the more I suspect that life isn’t divided between good decisions and bad decisions.

It’s divided between familiar decisions and unfamiliar ones.

We naturally assume the familiar is safer because we’ve already survived it.

Whether it still fits our life is an entirely different question.

Familiar Has a Powerful Sales Pitch

Retirement taught me that.

There was a long stretch of my life when every morning meant the same rhythm—coffee, calendar, somewhere to be, someone expecting me to show up as a particular version of myself.

Then one day, all of that just stopped.

I won’t pretend that decision was easy.

People sometimes ask if I enjoyed retiring early, as if I woke up one morning, smiled, and skipped happily into permanent vacation.

That’s not how it happened.

I worried about whether I’d miss the work. I wondered what I would do with my time. I questioned whether I was walking away too soon.

There were moments when staying exactly where I was felt like the sensible choice.

It was familiar.

Familiar has a powerful sales pitch.

The same thing happened when Jan and I decided to leave Ohio. Then again when we left Wisconsin. Then again when Florida slowly stopped feeling like the place where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives.

Every move came with a long list of reasons to stay put.

We knew the neighborhoods.

We knew the grocery stores.

We knew which roads flooded after heavy rain and which restaurants made the best fish fry.

Starting over meant giving all of that up in exchange for uncertainty.

People are always quick to point out the risks of making a change.

“What if you don’t like it?”

“What if you made a mistake?”

Those are fair questions.

What I’ve noticed is that almost nobody asks the opposite.

“What if this becomes one of the best decisions you ever made?”

Standing on my porch in Tennessee these days, it’s hard not to smile at how unlikely this chapter once seemed.

If you’d shown this life to me twenty years ago, I probably would have laughed.

Me? Living in Tennessee? Remodeling bathrooms? Writing stories about them for strangers to read?

I wouldn’t have believed you.

Life, thankfully, has never asked for my permission before surprising me.

The Risk We Don’t See

One thing that changes as you grow older is your relationship with risk.

When you’re young, risk usually means losing money, failing at something, or looking foolish.

After a few decades, your definition begins to change.

You realize money has a way of coming back. A bruised ego heals faster than you imagined. Even mistakes eventually become stories that make people laugh around the dinner table.

Time, however, never offers a refund.

That may be the quietest lesson aging forces on you.

You stop assuming there will always be another chance.

Another trip.

Another move.

Another opportunity.

Another year.

There may be.

There may not be.

I’ve made my share of mistakes over the years. Some cost money. Some cost sleep. A few probably took years off my life while they were happening.

If you’ve been following my shower adventure, you already know I have an advanced degree in turning simple projects into graduate-level research.

Apparently replacing a shower requires enough YouTube videos to earn continuing education credits.

Oddly enough, I don’t regret any of it.

Not because every decision worked out perfectly.

They didn’t.

I don’t regret them because I learned something every single time.

The regrets that still drift through my mind aren’t attached to the things I tried.

They’re attached to the things I talked myself out of before I ever gave them a fair chance.

The phone call I never made.

The opportunity I convinced myself wasn’t the right time.

The places I assumed I’d get around to visiting someday.

Regret is an unusually polite guest.

It doesn’t kick the door down or make a dramatic entrance.

It simply pulls up a chair beside you one quiet evening and asks a question that has no answer.

I wonder what would have happened?

We Choose Our Uncertainty

I’ve come to believe that every decision carries risk.

Taking the job is risky.

Not taking it is risky.

Moving across the country is risky.

Spending the rest of your life wondering if you should have moved carries its own kind of risk.

We’re never really choosing between risk and safety.

We’re choosing which uncertainty we’re willing to live inside.

These days, I still make lists. I still compare prices longer than necessary. I still spend an embarrassing amount of time researching things that probably don’t require nearly as much research.

Some habits refuse to retire.

But eventually there comes a moment when the reading has to stop.

You sign the papers.

You board the plane.

You make the phone call.

You tear out the shower.

Maybe It Was Never About the Shower

Every morning now, I step into a bathroom that feels like it belongs in this stage of my life.

Most people would simply see tile, glass, and a rainfall showerhead.

I see something different.

I see the day I almost decided the old one was good enough.

Funny thing is, I don’t think this story was ever about a shower.

I think it was about how easily we confuse familiarity with happiness simply because it’s comfortable.

We tell ourselves that if something still works, we shouldn’t disturb it.

Sometimes that’s wisdom.

Sometimes it’s fear wearing a very sensible disguise.

I’ve reached the point where I’m less afraid of trying something that doesn’t work than I am of spending years wondering whether it might have.

Because the truth is, we don’t get to know how every road ends before we take it.

And maybe we were never supposed to.

The biggest risk in life may not be taking the chance.

It may be convincing yourself there will always be time to take it later.