As the weeks stretch into months – without divine intervention – I find myself looking at others' lives or day-to-day routines through a rose-colored lens. The simplest things seem shinier. Look prettier and easier. And it has all started to shave away at my own happiness. Before I knew it, I hit the point of dreading the "What's new with you?" question because my answer was always the same: Nothing. Not much here.
Theodore Roosevelt, a much wiser person than me, once said, "Comparison is the thief of all joy." Which is the truth – and exactly what I've been guilty of. It's just that everyone seems so busy and lucky and fulfilled, from new jobs and better pay to even the simplest and silliest of things, like spending Saturday morning at brunch instead of clearing dishes off the table. In contrast, I feel boring and ungrateful and this small – which I'm not (and know I'm not) but sometimes forget.
The double-whammy here, about this comparison thief, is that it's self-created (ego) and society-created (collective ego). Always searching for a rank, the ego tells you and me and everyone in between that there's superior and inferior, upward and downward, a proverbial mountain to scale and that the top is the place to be. But the reality is that life is not – and never will be – lived in a vertical plane. There is no top, and even if there were, once reached there would be nowhere new to go. Imagine that heartache and loneliness. Imagine being robbed of that joy.
Life, I think, is horizontal. One day rolls into the next, and whether rich or poor, homeless or executive, mansion or cardboard box, time moves in the same direction for all of us. Its linear quality means there is no bottom and no top. No high, no low. Just what is, and its ability to continually push us toward whatever's in store along the way – a journey which is ours and ours alone, without compare.
Onward
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