You Did Your Best? Really?

You often hear people use this old saw, “well, I did my best.” They seem so sincere, and maybe they even believe it. It is, however, almost never true.

It is much more likely that they have not, in fact, employed all of their natural abilities to their best advantage while applying the greatest possible energy to the entire enterprise. In almost every case, you will find that their efforts lost efficiency due to one or more from among many factors. Social anxiety; fear of failure; fear of success; despair; stage fright; passive-aggregation; any of the many emotional handicaps that afflict modern humans; laziness; being unprepared; failure to avail one's self of good luck when it presents itself. This list could be stretched out a lot further.

I am at the stage of life where the scales fall off of our eyes and we are forced to see what has been there all the time. Our failures, in Technicolor and Panavision, which we are forced to watch like that juvenile delinquent towards the end of Clockwork Orange. There are no Mulligans, no do-overs. These are the things that we fucked up, and we see them with eyes open or shut, awake or asleep, haunting us. The only course open to us is to smile and try to make a good show of disintegrating in real-time and finally dying. Or, disregarding once again the feelings of those who may enjoy our company, taking the easy way out. Attempts at contrition just make it worse, and there is no “Way-Back” machine that we can use to travel back forty or fifty years and do things differently. No, we are left to tell ourselves, “I did my best.”

Even though it is a lie. Most of us know it to be a lie. What we did was, at best, as much as we could manage at the time, faced with our own set of challenges. In my case, it has never been enough. Ask anyone.

If you are my age or thereabouts, and you were also blessed with a family, good for you. This may be a family of your own procreation, or a family that you were born into, which has always surrounded you with fellowship and love. It may even simply be a family of good, long-term friends, who look out for each other and share a strong bond of love. Not everyone is so lucky. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to raise two fine sons, only having to divorce their mother when my sons were already in their forties.

If you, dear reader, have had that opportunity, and your family has always been generous with forgiveness and acceptance, and they still share their love with you, I salute you.