All through grade school & well into college, I habitually obsessed over tests & homework assignments. Hoping to allay my anxieties, my parents would always tell me, “Just do the best you can.” Naturally I understood, equally well at age 9 as at 19, that this was their way of saying they loved me regardless of what grades I earned. Far from soothing me, though, their words in fact created an additional concern for how, exactly, was I to determine what “my best” was? After all, “my best” could conceivably mean studying & doing homework Every. Single. Waking. Hour!
I realize now that my quandary boiled down to a question of being able to set healthy boundaries for myself. Of course, boundary-setting, healthy or otherwise, was not a skill I had mastered by then. Let’s face it: Boundary-setting was a skill I didn’t even know existed then. And in truth, it would be many more years before I understood the wisdom of determining & honoring boundaries in all areas of one’s life.
Fast forward to the present & instead of fretting over whether I’ve studied enough for a test or put enough effort into a term paper, I stand before my easel & fret over whether I can give myself permission to be finished with this painting. Have I indeed done “my (very) best?” In On Finishing, I said that it’s time for me to wrap up a painting when I’ve succeeded in telling the story I set out to tell. But “Is this painting truly finished?” is a 2-part question & having told the painting’s story means I’ve only accomplished Part One. The second part is, “Have I told it to the best of my ability?” or, in my parents’ words, “Have I done the best I can?”
No one can answer that question but me. It is completely subjective & demands the utmost in conscientious self-scrutiny. In order to answer it with anything approaching honesty, one must be willing to plumb the very depths of one’s being. Yet amazingly, no one else will know or care what that answer is & there will be no final grade or annual performance appraisal by which to gauge one’s efforts.
So why is it vital to me to do my best on any given painting? Because the extent to which I’ve done my best is the extent to which I can minimize my inevitable “emotional hangover,” described in the blog, On Beginning Again. And that, in turn, frees me up psychologically when I start my next painting.
Which brings me back to my original quandary: How do I know when I’ve done the best I can? In a nutshell, it’s when I cannot imagine being able to make any part of my painting any better. Ideally, of course, this would always be the scenario. In reality, though, inspiration sometimes dissipates before this benchmark can be reached, leaving me not so much asking myself if I’ve done my best as wondering how much effort is enough effort. And while sanity, in the guise of healthy boundaries, may eventually dictate that I give myself permission to be finished, I nevertheless suspect that in doing so, I’m letting myself in for one intense emotional hangover!