Defining Enough

In the messy middle

When I started gardening, I went from zero to one hundred overnight. I ordered a bunch of books and mapped out dozens of projects. I ripped up our yard, built raised beds, and spent every free moment researching and buying plants to transform our landscape and feed us or the wildlife.

Now, it was the summer of 2020, and before we had kids, so I had a lot of time on my hands. But if I’m honest, or if you asked my wife, this is a common pattern for me. I never dip my toe in the water. I just jump in. I don’t take things slow. I ramp them all the way up. I did the same thing when I picked up golf and started backpacking. It’s how I launched my first business and began writing online.

There’s something exhilarating about the process. I love how it creates an entirely new lens through which I see the world. Take gardening. All of a sudden, there were plants everywhere I looked. Even my metaphors changed. Instead of competition, I began to think in terms of cultivation. Instead of chasing growth, I learned to build healthy soil.

But there’s a shadow side to this.

It’s not sustainable or balanced. You can’t be all in on everything. So often, I flame out or move on to the next new thing. There are many reasons for this: the novelty runs out, the progress stalls, and the time commitment adds up.

But there’s a subtler piece at the root of this shadow side. One that explains why I often struggle to sustain new activities and why many people bail on new habits like exercise.

When I plunged headfirst into gardening, I naturally began to look for experts to guide me. I read all of Monty Don’s books.¹ I devoured hours of YouTube videos about homesteading. Very quickly, my sense of what was possible expanded. But so did my bar for what was enough. I began to think like and compare my efforts to people who were professional gardeners or full-time homesteaders.

Not surprisingly, it felt like I couldn’t keep up. I slowly became more and more aware of all the things I wasn’t doing.

Awareness and knowledge come with costs.

When you embrace a new activity and try out a new worldview, you don’t just sign up for the good parts. You are also gifted with new concerns and greater complexity.

I started to become more attuned to the damage we were doing to our natural world. I began to recognize how little connection most of us have to where our food comes from. These are important realizations that I continue to deepen into, but they also magnified the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough.

It’s challenging to be 60% into a way of life or to embrace 80% of a philosophy. In this messy middle, we’re aware of the issues and opportunities but not deep enough to feel fully aligned or reap all the benefits. When I’m here, I notice a pull in both directions. To opt out and bury my head in the sand, and to lean in and devote my whole identity to the cause.²

The problem is, in most cases, neither is a realistic option.

Once we know, we know. I cannot magically forget all of the things that gardening has opened my eyes to. I can’t shed my new connection to the land or my growing disgust with our modern food system.

And I cannot become a full-time homesteader or professional gardener. Well, I could, but I can’t do that and also work on our healthcare crisis, be the dad I want to be, deepen into the spiritual path, and build a vibrant social life. I have to balance competing priorities and conflicting desires.

In each domain, I have to answer for myself: what is enough for me?

You may not struggle with this pattern like I do. Maybe you’re far better at naturally finding the level that’s right for you. I have many friends who pick up an instrument without feeling pressure to become a great musician or start yoga without feeling the need to become a good yogi.³

But nowhere do I see this pattern play out more clearly than in today's health and fitness world. When it comes to embracing exercise and living a healthy lifestyle, this question nags at us:

Am I doing enough?

When I look around to answer this, most of the guidance is from experts who devote their entire lives to optimizing fitness and hacking health. So it’s no surprise that they gift us with a laundry list of ways to be different to do enough:

Wake up at 5 am. Get 10 minutes of sunlight (even though it’s dark). Do 45 minutes of exercise. Make sure to cycle each day to achieve the perfect ratio of zone 2, HIIT, and resistance training. Sauna, then cold plunge. Don’t forget meditation. At exactly 90 minutes, you can have a cup of coffee. Make sure to build your entire life around optimizing sleep. But don’t forget your relationships. And eat whole30, except when you’re fasting. Oh, and buy this supplement stack to lower your biological age.

Wait, you have young kids and a busy job? Sorry, enjoy your early, untimely death.

This isn’t to criticize the people who share these messages. Or to say that many of these things can’t be valuable. It’s to point out the frustrating reality that I keep encountering. I can’t be all in on everything. The experts I look to for inspiration and guidance can also cast a shadow of idealized standards. I can’t embrace their definition of healthy without welcoming all parts of their life.

I need to determine it for myself.

Instead of adopting their scoreboard, I can embody a version that fits all of what I care about. Instead of optimizing every facet of my life, I can find levels that are aligned and sustainable. Instead of abandoning an activity altogether, I can embrace the tension of the messy middle.

As a result, my gardening has become a slow burn.

I grow what I can and lean on our local farm. I plant what will feed our family for years, like medicinal herbs, berry bushes, and nut trees. I think less about what I didn’t get to this month and more about what I can build in this decade.⁴ I remember that my life, just like the garden, has seasons.

It’s enough for me.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear from you with any reflections in the comments or by replying directly to this email.

1. Monty’s TV show Big Dreams, Small Spaces is an absolute delight

2. A friend recently commented that this propensity to frequently evolve our identity and compare our efforts is a classic Enneagram 3 move. So, maybe most others don’t struggle with this pattern as much.

3. Thanks to

Lou Tamposi

who listened to me rant about this dynamic and helped articulate the difficulty of this messy middle ground.

4. Here’s a project that didn’t go as planned. I created these beds for more berry bushes and some small fruit trees but ended up filling them with a messy emergency flower garden. We’ll try again next year!

It still fed the wildlife and added beauty to our life