I was driving down a Texas highway when a shovel suddenly appeared in the roadway in front of me.
This shovel was no pithy digging tool. It was a monster of forged metal. And it was a problem.
I had no idea why it was there. All I knew was it was in my way, and I was running out of time to avoid disaster.
My first instinct was to swerve. But I quickly remembered that veering out of my lane too quickly could cause the car to flip over. So, I made a more gradual shift to the highway shoulder on my right.
The maneuver went well — at first. In an instant, the solid white line marking the right edge of the highway was in front of me. Then, the concrete shoulder appeared, with no shovel in sight.
But a split-second later, I saw something else through the windshield. Green grass.
I had overshot the shoulder, and my car was now careening down an embankment.
I tried frantically to turn back to the road and to avoid getting stuck in the ditch. I tugged the wheel to the left. I pressed harder and harder on the brakes. But gravity and momentum were not cooperating.
When the car finally did come to a stop, it was at the bottom of the embankment. It was facing the wrong way, mere feet from the retaining wall.
I unbuckled my seat belt, opened the door, and did a walkaround, looking for any sign of damage. It looked like I had done one of those NASCAR burnouts, with semicircular tire track patterns in the embankment and green blades of grass sticking to the sides of my car. But somehow, the vehicle was intact.
I wandered up toward the highway to get a better view of what I had just endured. The shovel was quite a distance up the road from where I had ended up. That meant I was out of the line of fire, even if the hunk of metal was to go flying.
I started thinking about how that shovel ended up in the road.
There were a couple of possibilities.
I had been driving behind a pickup stocked with landscaping tools. Maybe those tools hadn’t been properly secured, and the shovel had slid off the back.
Or maybe the workers in the left lane, protected by orange construction cones, had been careless. Maybe a lapse in judgment had sent the shovel from their workstation into traffic.
Either answer seems far-fetched in hindsight. But at the moment of truth, each seemed likely. And I was in no mood to let them go unaddressed.
The landscaping truck was two miles down the road by now. It was too late to track it down.
But the construction crew? All that separated me from them was the highway blacktop.
I glared in their direction.
Hey! I yelled at the workers. Y’all left a shovel in the lane over there! Y’all could have gotten me killed!
The crewmembers stared at me in bewilderment for a moment. Then they got back to work. My attempt to give them a piece of my mind had come up empty.
Dejected, I got back in my car and drove up the embankment. But as I got back onto the highway, I felt a strange sensation.
Irony.
I am a completionist.
I believe that nothing is worth celebrating unless it’s finished. And that a work in progress is nothing more than a jumbled mess.
Some may confuse these sentiments with perfectionism. But there are some key differences.
Perfectionists worry about whether a job is done flawlessly. Completionists worry if the job is done, period.
There are issues with both philosophies. Perfect can be the enemy of done. And done can be the enemy of satisfactory — if the urge to clear our to-do lists supersedes common sense.
Even so, I err on the side of completionism. The chaos of a project in process leaves a sour taste in my mouth — even though I recognize that the mess of change is often drawn-out by necessity.
I want to avoid this outcome at all costs. So, I use my discomfort as fuel to get the job done.
This ethos is what’s stoked my intense work ethic. It’s why I log extra hours to make sure assignments don’t bleed into the next day. It’s why I tune out the noise and focus religiously on the task at hand.
Others have asked why I drive myself into the ground like this, day after day. And I’ve generally responded to these inquiries with a proverb.
Don’t leave a shovel in the road.
For years, this had been nothing more than a figure of speech. But not anymore.
Now, I had gotten up close and personal with an actual shovel in the road.
I had seen the dangers. I had felt the risk.
And I didn’t like it one bit.
Half-measures are having a moment like never before.
As the world reckons with everything from pandemics to natural disasters, less and less feels guaranteed.
And with tomorrow more uncertain than ever before, we are putting less effort into sorting out today.
The urge to finish what we started seems to be waning. For what good is the feeling of a job well done when our lives are upside down? Better to do only what’s needed to get through the day, the week, the month. And then to clean up the mess once the dust settles.
At least that’s the way that many see our present predicament.
I understand this sentiment. I too have sometimes struggled to maintain motivation at a time when normal is becoming a faded memory.
But we need to fight through our malaise.
For danger lies beneath the fog of the moment. The danger that leaving a mess can bring.
And we’d really rather not come face-to-face with it.
We don’t want to relive my nightmare from that Texas highway. We don’t want to end up careening down the embankment, veering from one near-disaster to another.
So, we have an obligation not to leave the shovel in the road. We have a responsibility to tidy up.
In both good times and bad, we must be good stewards for ourselves and our neighbors. We must do our part to make the world a safer and more vibrant place.
Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Let’s finish what we started.
Let’s get that shovel out of the road.