It’s college visit time. Shiny brochures, dozens of postcards, accolades in headlines…Best School, Best Value…Top 10…Number 1. One of these beautiful schools will be The Perfect One for Jack. The best education for the money in the best location. Surely it will become clear…although, after a few visits, we are more overwhelmed than we anticipated. The gorgeous campus has the highest price tag, but the highest ranked school is so big we are afraid he’d feel lost…finding the perfect one is going to be harder than we thought.

As I skim through my FaceBook and Twitter feeds, I see so many people posting and hashtagging about their passions…#MeToo, #ILookLikeASurgon, #EndGunViolence, #SaveTheEarth…I am both jealous of and annoyed by their posts. You see, I want to have that kind of passion. I want to have a cause. I want to speak boldly for that which I believe in. But knowing that I can’t be the ambassador for every cause in the world, I want to choose the perfect one. I want to choose the one that has the biggest impact, for the most people; the most worthy cause through the best agency with a superior record of excellence and integrity…the perfect one. I want women to be treated fairly, to receive equal pay for equal work and be recognized for their accomplishments; I want people to stop dying at the other end of the barrel of a gun; I want there to be no more sex trafficking and I want laborers all over the world to be treated fairly for the products I purchase from them; I want impoverished peoples to have access to clean water; I want a cure for AIDS and cancer and diabetes and all else that ails us; I want the museums to stay open and free and I want every child to have access to education; I want clean air and organic vegetables…and while we are at it, I want the whales saved and an end to global warming. I want it all…Who wouldn’t?

But in my quest for this perfect passion, I have found that that I am paralyzed in my indecision, overwhelmed by my options. As a result, I have had a lukewarm response to one or two, a Tweet here or there, a few dollars to this one or that one…but not an embrace of one. I am crippled.

We have a saying in surgery, “Perfect is the enemy of good”, which is borrowed from the phrase made popular by Voltaire and can be traced back to Shakespeare. This feeling is not new. Stagnated and still by the pursuit of an ideal so far from our reach that we fail to even try. In surgery, we perform the operation, and after the bowel is sutured back together, it may not look perfect, but it works. We are tempted to take it apart and try to make it better, but more often than not, we end up making it worse, removing too much or damaging another organ near it. The lesson is to accept what is good, knowing that it’s not perfect, but worthy, and move on.

The quest for perfect has, sadly, tempered my response to many worthy causes.  What I need to know now is that there is too much to be done, too many deserving charities, there is not a perfect one, but there are many good ones. There is not one perfect school for Jack. But there is one that is good, where he will thrive and learn and grow. In this life, most of what we will encounter is not perfect, but much of it will be good. Much will have at it’s heart, the good for our fellow human. Perfect is what we will all enjoy in heaven…but on this earth, right now…going towards good, letting go of the unreachable perfect, will be what moves us forward, to make any difference that we can, with what we have, while we are here.

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.