It's all relative

I was out with a client today looking at what he and his company have sought to achieve to remediate their site.

They have made consistent efforts to revegetate the area over the last few years. But as I toured the site with him, my sense of disappointment was very real: the revegetation work appeared to have moved so slowly with patchy growth and most of it fairly slow.

But it's all relative. As the client described to me what the site was like before their work, and even what the surrounding bushland was like (even though it was undisturbed like their site), it was obvious that this was a solid advance.

Advancements are all relative. If they'd been working in a lush paradise the results would have been very disappointing. But given they're working in a veritable wasteland with no topsoil, rough-as-guts subsoils, high exposure and little rainfall, it's actually a pretty good step ahead.

Sometimes we forget this, don't we, as we quest for advancements that meet our own expectations? Sometimes we forget that achievement has to be measured in relation to what was there to start with.