20140117.0628

As I was writing in my journal last night (yes, I keep a journal), I caught myself as I was about to make a comment about giving my "best effort."  It occurred to me that I rarely if ever feel as though I have given my "best" effort.  I know that I could work much harder and with more focus on any one of the many things I ought to be doing in my personal and professional lives, thereby achieving greater effect.  I can do better almost always, so at no point that I recall can I claim with any accuracy to have done my best.

Thinking on the matter further, I came to the notion that few people do.  People can rarely look back at their words and deeds and say that they did not have it in them to speak better or do better.  Most or all have gone away from a thing and later thought "Oh, I should have said" or "I should have done" something different, something other than what was said or done, something that would have been better.  It happens often, and since it is a matter of definition that nothing can be better than the best, in each of those instances, we have not done our best.

More thought on the matter, however, leads me to a good reason for our collective failure to do our best, one that may well actually excuse the error.  Better work tends to require more focus; the best work requires most focus.  Focus shuts other things out.  Shutting things out creates problems that ought not to arise.  It cuts us off from parts of ourselves we need.  For example, I could work more diligently as a scholar, shutting myself away in my office or the library with books and scholarly journals, leaving Sherwood Cottage well before dawn and returning well after dark and staying there only to sleep the few hours that my body demands and that I begrudge.  I know this because a fair number of my days as a graduate student were spent thusly, and my undergraduate career was not too much different in that regard.  But for me to act in such a way would diminish me now.  It would cut me off from my beloved wife and our child whom she carries (who is kicking with some force, as I felt last night).  It would cut me off from the markedly enjoyable talks I have with colleagues, talks which may not be strictly of work but are illuminating even so.  It would cut me off from that which makes me human.

More than simple biology, the connectedness to others humanizes, and for a scholar of the humanities, loss of it would be...unfortunate.  The same is true for others; doing our "best" work, what it is that doing out "best" work requires, robs us of something vital, or threatens to do so (and even the threat, by imposing fear, works to the end of actually stealing from us).  We cannot be blamed for seeking not to be burgled.