The title of this post
You can’t be good at everything
is something my ex-business partner, Jonathan, said to me when I was being self-critical about a task I wasn’t good at, decades ago. My memory — which can’t be good at everything — tells me Jonathan said
You can’t be good at everything
when I was feeling shame about my living space being cluttered and not “guest-ready. ”
At various points in my life, it’s been helpful for me to say to myself
You can’t be good at everything
about other things, including
- doing my taxes
- drawing
- penmanship
- cleaning
- maneuvering gracefully around other people while walking
- keeping my cat away from my laptop
- calculus
- being a perfect mother
- singing loudly
- discussing politics
- keeping my hair neat all the time
- and many more.
Sometimes, I seem to think that I SHOULD be good at everything, but I hope my readers know that being good at everything is completely impossible, even if somebody wrote this in your 9th grade yearbook:
You can’t be good at everything, even if you encounter a kind person like Roger sometime in your life.
I can’t be good at everything, including capturing all the wonderful images around me, every single day. For example, yesterday I took only these three shots:
You can’t be good at everything, but I hope you’re good at leaving good-enough comments for this blog.
Good thanks to Jonathan, Roger, my neighbor Karen (for the custom-made bumper sticker on her car), and all the other good people who helped me create this post. Also, great thanks to you — of course! — for reading this, here and now.
The Year(s) of Living Non-Judgmentally 