My friend has a six-year-old daughter who loves to run. She competes in events of the Little Athletics organisation and at their club championships recently she looked like she was going to medal (too long here in America - I’ve absorbed their penchant for using nouns as verbs). That is, until she looked around at the girl who was running beside her. Just that small shift of focus took her out of the medal stakes.
Comparing ourselves with others, watching what they are doing and making judgments and assessments about how we rate in comparison with them, is a constant in the human experience. We just cannot seem to help ourselves.
But comparing ourselves with others is a futile and pointless exercise. We each have our place in the perfection of the Universe. No one can replace us or sit in as a substitution for us. We are all neeed just as we are.
We are like the small capilliaries that carry blood from the veins and arteries directly into the muscles. If one capilliary fails or becomes blocked, the movement of the whole muscle is affected and the overall functioning of the body is diminished.
Watching others as a way of assessing our own validity or worth leads only to frustration and despair. All comparisons are merely a matter of subjective perception and even though our perceptions create our so-called reality, if my perception is different from the next person’s, then whose is the right one?
Our uniqueness is sacred. It is something to be cherished and protected. The the whole Universe is diminished when we seek to silence our voice in the choir of life, or distort our image in the great art of eternity.
Life is an extremely declicate balancing act within the binaries of this human experience. It is a fine line we walk that bridges ego and spirit, creating and surrender, energy and stillness, peace and struggle, the reconciliation of self among many.
We cannot afford even the shortest glimpse to guage our own progress through comparison with others because it means, in that moment, we take our attention away from our own life purpose and we open ourselves to the fear that can incapacitate, destabilise and even paralyse us.
If we are riding the fast and fierce whitewater rapids we cannot compare our progress with those climbing a rockface. The skills involved and the demands of the two paths are so different they bear no comparison, and no useful information can be gleaned from such a comparison.
Even more important, we should realise that the shift in our attention from the important task at hand can have grave consequences. The strength and speed of the current requires our full and constant attention and any break in our concentration or focus can affect our own peace and progress. Anything less than vigilant attention to our own stuff may create a risk of going under.
Actors do not envy the costumes or the parts of the other actors on the stage or movie set, they accept their own costume as part of the role they chose to play. For those ready to hear it, this is not a far-fetched metaphor for life. For the rest, the sooner we unconditionally accept, and surrender to, both the path we are on and the body we have assumed that is uniquely suited to that path, the sooner we will have any hope of finding the peace we all yearn and the power to create our bliss.
And know this, all paths lead to bliss.
