Stop, thief!
My grandmother had a copy of the Desiderata up in her sunny, yellow kitchen. At different times in my life,
I’ve invoked passages from it. Right
now, I’m stuck on this one…
I’m not so much feeling the vain and bitter feels. I don’t have a lot to be vain about these
days, and bitter isn’t really my thing.
But sadness and longing are apparently my things.
Okay, okay. So, stop
comparing yourself to others. Got
it.
But. What if the “others”
is actually you?
Am I as physically as strong, as capable as I was a few years ago? Nope. I
am not.
Am I as driven in my job, do I love what I’m doing? Hardly.
Am I as driven in my job, do I love what I’m doing? Hardly.
Have I made progress financially, did I pay off those
expenses I incurred 18 month ago? Haha!
I see others doing the same…my friends who are injured, and
looking at last year’s run numbers.
People whose lives have shifted, and they look back and think things
were better then. Someone who took a
risk and maybe failed on this first go ‘round of a new enterprise, and things
are harder than they used to be.
Staying in the now, the right now, and focusing on what is
good (or at least okay-enough) is where joy comes from. It doesn’t mean stop striving to be something
better. But the better may come in a
totally different category. For me,
re-building relationships is something I’ve been striving for, and that has
come with a trade-off in the fitness category.
For others, fixing an old injury,
making their home better, working on a career change has been the better thing,
and the effort it has taken for those things makes other progress hard.
I’m working on trying NOT to compare myself to others. But also not comparing myself to some other version of me. It’s fucking hard. But pieces of my life are pretty awesome. And worth the extra pounds I'm carrying, the extra minutes I take on a run, sticking with a job I'm not sure of in exchange for some stability.
Comparison is the thief of joy. FDR said that. So.
Stop, Thief!!
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