Gloriously Good Enough

Sunday mornings at Rockbrook move at a gentler pace, with time to sleep in a little, enjoy a relaxed breakfast, and then gather as a whole community in the woods for Chapel. This week the Middlers led it, and the theme they chose was “Sunshine.” One by one, girls who had volunteered stood up to say what sunshine means to them. Some talked about the actual sun, the warmth and light that makes everything grow. Others talked about a different kind of sunshine, the feeling certain people give you just by being around. One girl shared a line from Winnie-the-Pooh: “If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few who make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day.” Sarah read a story about a girl named Elsa who tried again and again to carry sunbeams indoors to her grandmother, whose room never caught the light, only to learn that she had been her grandmother’s sunshine all along. It was a sweet, thoughtful morning. The girls sang “Here Comes the Sun,” and we all walked out of the woods a little warmer.

By the afternoon, things were considerably less contemplative. When we rang the bell after rest hour, the girls came pouring down to the landsports field in their swimsuits, and we handed out about 150 cans of plain white shaving cream. This was our special all-camp event for the day, a Rockbrook tradition I’ve written about many times: the shaving cream fight. Within five minutes the field was a tangle of shrieking, slipping, foam-covered girls. Foam mohawks, foam beards, foam handprints planted squarely between shoulder blades, the occasional “six pack” drawn on bellies. The slip-n-slide added its own layer of mayhem. The laughter out there is what erupts from unmistakable joy.

Thinking about it later, I realized part of its exuberant power may be that it gives girls a brief vacation from perfectionism. Commonly today, children feel a very real pressure to get things right— the right grades, the right performance, the right look, the right response to whatever the group seems to expect. You can sometimes sense that pressure humming underneath how they move through the world.

A girl who feels she must get everything right is always performing, even in ordinary moments. A simple conversation can become something to avoid because it might be “awkward,” or because she might think, “I won’t know what to say.” Studies of perfectionism in young people often point to the same worry underneath it: the fear of making mistakes and the dread of being judged. Sadly, the usual escape, more time online, only makes things worse— another audience, another review. Living under the bright light of perfectionism is exhausting for a kid.

Here is what a shaving cream fight offers that otherwise seems rare in a child’s life: there is no way to do it well. There are no teams, no score, no technique, no judges, and no outcome to measure or worry over. The whole point is to end up as ridiculous as possible. The writer G.K. Chesterton once quipped that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, meaning it’s better to jump in imperfectly than to wait for conditions you can’t control. A shaving cream fight goes even further… it can only be done badly. There’s really nothing to get right, so there’s actually nothing to get wrong either. You might be covered in foam, but all that watchful, self-critical machinery suddenly has nothing to grab. Come to a shaving cream fight and you can see it slip right off.

So if self-monitoring, that constant internal commentary of “how am I doing and what do they think of me?”, feeds a subtle anxiety, then a shaving cream fight provides relief because it makes self-monitoring impossible. Your attention is pulled entirely outward, toward the friend you’re stalking with a fat handful of foam, toward the ambush forming behind you, toward the counselor who somehow ended up with a full white wig. And because every single person on that field looks equally crazy, the fear of being judged collapses on the spot. There’s no time to work up any worry, either. The fight starts the instant the first can spurts, before anyone can stand at the edge wondering whether she’s ready. Anxiety feeds on delay and evaluation, and a shaving cream fight starves it of both. What rushes in to fill that space is joy.

That Sunday morning in Chapel, the Middlers reminded us that some people make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day. By evening, rinsed off with the water hoses and heading back up the hill for dinner, these Rockbrook girls had done exactly that for each other. Every girl was good enough— gloriously, drippingly good.