In life, and in society, there’s a lot of all-or-nothing thinking. Either you do something right, or you do it wrong. You do it well, or you’ve failed. Mediocre is an insult, despite its actual meaning being “moderate, medium, middling, halfway to the top.” An “average” grade is widely considered to be bad. In other words, if it’s not great, perfect, complete, extraordinary, excellent, permanent, transcendent, and everlasting, it’s considered “not good enough.”

It’s taken me a while to come around to realizing this is a heap of bullshit. Not doing something quite right doesn’t mean it’s been done completely wrong. Doing something in a flawed way might be a vast improvement over not doing it at all. Very few things last forever (and a lot of those that do, shouldn’t); the fact that something is not going to be permanent doesn’t make it worthless. And if you never finish cleaning the entire bathroom but sometimes you clean just the toilets, it’s still way better than never cleaning the toilets.

But it is quite hard to walk around being absolutely sure in my knowledge that mediocre is actually not bad when it seems like the entire world tells you it’s not enough. Which is a hideous thing to do to people, really, because “mediocre” requires a lot of goddamned work and effort to get to.

Life is hard. Mediocre is, in a lot of cases, good enough. But it’s sort of ingrained in Western culture, for some reason, that ordinary and mediocre and just okay is actually gross and awful.¹ The ways in which this manifests can be pretty subtle, and I don’t always see it.

So my faith, sometimes, wavers. And then I get sad because I’m not doing things “good enough.”

The Parable of Good Enough

Some months ago, I moved into my first house, with my very first patch of Outdoors that I’ve ever had. I was very excited to learn about Tending Things, and planting stuff, and taking care of my silly little bit of land.

Then I noticed the ivy.

I mean, I’d seen it before. It’s hard to ignore. It stretches across a six-foot wide strip of land all across the front and part of the sides of the property. But I, horticultural ignoramus that I am, just thought, “huh,” and didn’t think much else of it for a while.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the trees it had clambered up onto were on my property. And that it was very close to smothering the tops of most of them.

This struck me as, potentially, a Bad Thing. And so I learned some stuff.

hedera helix

English ivy — Hedera helix, which means “clingy spiraling thing” — is, in a lot of ways, kind of a rad plant. It grows well in the shade, it’s evergreen, and it has a sexy scientific name that sounds like the name of a siren who decided she was tired of luring sailors to their deaths and shifted to the bog witch career track. Like any plant with a significant root system, it can also help with preventing erosion, which is probably why someone planted it in the first place.

But the specific plants in question have spread way beyond the little slope they’re helping to hold together.

English ivy is invasive to the United States, and it’s aggressive. It can become so dense and widespread that it outcompetes native plants. When it invades the native trees, it can eventually reach the canopy and block sunlight from the leaves of the tree. The roots can get so large and numerous around the trunk of the tree that it competes with the tree for nutrients and water. The leaves and vines on the tree itself can hold moisture against the bark, making it more vulnerable to rot and disease, and the weight of them can increase pressure on the tree in high winds, making them more prone to breakage or collapse.

There are, confusingly, several articles on the web that declare English ivy to be “misunderstood” and claim that they “do not kill trees,” but, upon further investigation, I decided this is a pardon on a technicality. English ivy is not a parasite; it does not directly drain nutrients from the tree, nor does it directly hurt the tree. In that sense, these pro-ivy claims are correct. But even these articles don’t deny that uncontrolled ivy can put numerous pressures on a tree that make it harder to survive.

I sort of feel like, in this case, it’s like the difference between murdering someone with an axe and locking them in a basement they can’t escape from. Like, okay, you haven’t actually been murdered if you are locked in a basement, but now you have to eat mice and spiders and lick dampness off the walls to survive. At some point, you’re probably going to get scurvy and osteomalacia and intestinal parasites. You have not been directly harmed by the charming psychopath who lured you into the basement and left you there, technically, but you most certainly are not okay, and you will become so fragile that the slightest bit of misfortune is going to kill you.

Anyway. The point is, I decided that the ivy would have to go.

instruments of death (for english ivy)

On the face of it, the removal of English ivy, as with any other plant, is very simple: make the roots of the plant gone and/or dead.

But a simple thing is not necessarily easy. In fact, I’ve found that often, things that are simple are extremely not-easy.

The best option for the removal of English ivy is Hire Someone Else to Do It. Preferably, someone with an entire crew of people, ideally people whose backs are not super fucked up. But, thanks to my unstoppable and increasingly expensive dental problems, I have been living solely on credit card debt for some months now, and hiring someone is not an option.

You can also hire goats. Goats can easily strip away a lot of invasive plants, and have the additional benefit of being adorable. However, this does also cost money. And it is my understanding that while goats may help to dislodge or weaken the roots, most of the roots and remnants — especially the huge ones around the trees — would still be left for me to deal with, or would need repeated applications of goats over a long period.

Methods for destroying the roots seemed to be numerous, as I looked into more and more corners of the internet: manual digging and pulling, sometimes followed by covering the area with mulch, tarp or cardboard to smother anything left over; spraying various commercial herbicides like glyphosate; using non-synthetic homemade herbicides like salt and vinegar; dumping boiling water all over the affected patch; tying your daughter naked to a rock by the ocean to sacrifice her to an enormous sea serpent sent by Poseidon; etc. There are also very specific methods that some people use for all of the above that seemed to involve a lot of methodical and careful effort.

Personally, I don’t do well with careful and methodical. I am not proud of this. If I could do careful and methodical, I would probably break fewer things and it would take me less time to do stuff, since I wouldn’t have to invent the method anew every single time I do something. But at this point in my life, I think I just have to accept that “haphazard and chaotic” is more or less how I get anything done.

Because I know I am not methodical or careful, however, I was instantly apprehensive of any method that might kill plants other than the ivy if I were to accidentally spill it or spray it somewhere I didn’t mean to. That pretty much just left me with manual removal.

If your ivy has become thick and brutal and advanced quite far up several trees, as mine has, this involves cutting the vines off from the roots, and creating a gap between the cut-off vine and root so that any regrowth does not immediately connect the two again. (If you pull the entire vine away from the tree, it can remove a lot of the tree bark, like…peeling its skin off, kind of, so you don’t want to do a lot of this.) Then, ideally, you go after the roots.

So I got some gloves, a handsaw, a shovel and a trash bag, and I started the project.

falling into the hole of “not good enough”

It quickly became apparent that I was not going to get very far in a single session of ivy removal. For one thing, I do not have the patience to do any one thing for very long, generally speaking. For another, regardless of whether I was sawing, pulling, bagging or digging, my lower back started to crap out after roughly fifteen minutes.

So this became a weekly thing, which meant it became tedious, which meant I started whining about it to anyone who would listen, and also started to try to find out if I was being stupid and doing everything wrong.

In these forays into Internet Feedbackland, I gradually became convinced that yes, I was doing everything wrong. What I found circled me back to needing to hire a service because the job was too huge for me and my shitty back, or that I needed use herbicide or boiling water or other broad-spectrum killingstuff because there was no way I would be able to manually remove every root remnant and it would all come roaring back if I tried. Some of the random strangers I plied for horticultural knowledge even went so far as to say that trying to pull out the roots was pointless. All of which, in a sense, was totally true, or likely close to it.

I couldn’t hire anyone. I did not want to use herbicide because I did not want to do more research in the pursuit of performing yet another tortured equation of “is this thing I want to do going to do more harm to the environment than good.” And I was still worried about potentially killing nearby plants.

But every piece of information I could find generally seemed to point to “you cannot get rid of the ivy alone.”

I did the thing I usually do and I got sad. I thought, I can’t do this. It’s taking me too long, it’s too much, it’s not going to work, and it will just grow back.

This isn’t good enough.

I thought it was basically hopeless unless I hired someone, so I had to wait. So I gave up, and did nothing.

climbing out of the hole of “not good enough” and into the gentle swaying wheat fields of “okay for now”

It got really windy one day, and a small tree fell over in my yard. It was not one of the trees affected by ivy. But it got my brain running again. What if it had been a bigger tree, what if it had been closer to the house? Like those that were being choked by the ivy?

Also, I fractured another tooth root and broke off another filling. I was running out of credit to coast on, and “paying off the debt” was getting further and further away. I wasn’t going to hire anyone to deal with my plants anytime soon, and spring was coming. Stuff would grow. Some stuff I didn’t want to grow.

I went out one day and looked up. And I noticed that, on the trees I had gone after, the ivy vines I had severed from the roots with a handsaw some months earlier were dying.

The roots I had left, of course, were still there. But they hadn’t sprouted anything that I could see.

Would they, at some point? Probably. But it had been two months. Winter months, granted, but still. If it was going to regrow, it wasn’t immediate. And in the meantime, I’d probably started to ease some of the pressure on the trees.

Which, I remembered, was actually the entire fucking point.

Complete removal of the ivy was, perhaps, the ideal end goal. But what I had actually wanted to do, from the beginning, was to make it easier for the other plants to survive. I didn’t have to perfectly, completely, and immediately remove all of the ivy to do that.

All I had to do was slow it down.

fighting for the middle ground: because mediocrity is hard enough

So I’m back to the weekly sessions of fucking up the ivy.

Every week I spend as long as my back will let me pulling, cutting or digging. It’s not very long, but usually, I can fill a bag of ivy in a session. I do this non-methodically and chaotically. In a lot of places, it doesn’t look like I’ve done much. There’s still a fucking ridiculous amount of ivy. A lot of what I’ve cut may start to grow back, at some point.

But I’ve slowed it down. I’ve slightly reduced the weight of leaves and moisture on the trees and cleared extremely tiny patches of soil that might allow other plants to grow there. I’ve called it a lot of obscene names and told it to go fuck various fireplaces and Olympic torches. It’s not much, so far, but it’s something.

It’s a mediocre result. And it’s not great, but it’s not bad.

It’s good enough.

Perfect is the Enemy

I can’t actually remember if the saying is “perfect is the enemy of good” or “perfect is the enemy of done,” but either way, it works.

You do not have to kill all the invasives all at once to help the native plants. You do not have to clean the entire bathroom to make it less gross. You do not have to go full-and-stringent vegan in order to eat less meat. You do not have to adopt a completely perfect zero-waste lifestyle in order to use less plastic and generate less garbage. You do not have to swear off all cake forever in order to eat healthier, or go to the gym every day to get more exercise, or free everyone you’ve ever locked in a random abandoned basement in order to doom fewer people to a slow death in a grave of their own filth. If you let even one of them out, well, to that one person, you’ve made a huge difference.

Mediocrity is really quite difficult to achieve. Sometimes just treading water takes all the energy and resources you have. But, hell, if you’re still treading, you’re not drowning, which is the entire point. It would be nicer if you could swim to shore so you didn’t have to try so hard, of course, but sometimes the ideal solution is not in immediate reach. It’s not great, but it’s not bad.

And if you have never locked someone in a basement and left them to die, or murdered them with an axe, or lured sailors to their doom, well, look at all the not-bad you’ve done already. I’m proud of you.

—

¹I say “Western culture” here because it’s the one I live in and am therefore somewhat familiar with, and my knowledge of other cultures is not nearly as good as I’d like it to be, and certainly not good enough to make vague pronouncements about; this sentiment about mediocrity may well apply to others.