try harder

One of my earliest memories is of our move from Ogden, Utah to Baltimore, Maryland, where my Dad would be attending school. We traveled by car, hauling our worldly possessions in a trailer behind us. An exciting thing for us children was to go through a tunnel or over a bridge. I was four, my brothers three and two, so you can imagine what a hard thing it was to keep us quiet and entertained on such a long journey. Mother reminded us often how important it was that we keep still and quiet so we “wouldn’t have an accident.”

Coming down a hill at one point, my Dad discovered the brakes were not working and the car escalated to a dangerous speed. To try and slow down the car, he steered so as to scrape the trailer against the side of the mountain, hoping the friction would help slow things down. Back and forth he eased into and then away from the mountain. I was asleep on the floor of the back seat during all of this, but somehow the door opened and I fell out of the car. The trailer caught me and dragged me for a ways. My Dad must have noticed in his mirror for when the road leveled and the car stopped, he dashed back for me, half-expecting me to be dead. I was scraped up pretty bad but there was nothing broken.

I still remember being washed up in the bath that night, feeling so miserable, and puzzling over how this could have happened, “I was trying so hard to be still and quiet…”

Somehow I came to believe that if things didn’t work, I just needed to try harder. And isn’t that what we are told so much of the time? Try harder in school, try harder to get along, try harder to be good… if you just try to be a better mother, wife… The sad truth is, sometimes we are already doing the very best that we can; being told to “try harder” means we are failing to measure up so someone else’s standard. How do we quantify “try harder”? How do we know when we’ve tried hard enough? Can we ever be satisfied with doing our best when there is that oppressive weight looming over us that we still need to try harder? And, no matter how hard you try, some things will just never work out. Rumplestilskin aside, no matter how hard one tries, straw cannot be spun into gold.

And so, here are the important life lessons to be learned:

*Your best is good enough (the atonement makes it so)

*Some things happen in spite of your best effort (my trying harder to be

quiet wouldn’t have, couldn’t have prevented my injuries back on that hill).

*Know when it is time to give up spinning that straw…

Remember,

“A fanatic is one who loses sight of his goal, but doubles his efforts to get there.”