Hello again,
Welcome.
Can I ask you a question?
Have you ever looked at someone else and wondered,
Why can't I be more like them?
Perhaps it's someone at school,
College,
A friend.
A brother or sister.
Someone at work.
Someone you respect or admire.
Perhaps a sporting personality or someone on social media you look up to.
We compare ourselves in so many ways,
How we look.
What we achieve.
How confident we feel or appear.
How many friends we have.
The work we do.
Physical appearance and social media presence.
And the life that we imagine someone else is living.
Perhaps one of the reasons comparison feels so powerful today.
Is because our attention is so often drawn toward the lives of others.
Beautiful places,
Attractive and successful people.
All pointing to lifestyles of achievement and confidence.
Excitement or status.
Lifestyles that appeal to the senses.
And our growing imagination.
But this conversation is not centred around how to success.
Social media or its influences.
People have always compared themselves with others.
Can I ask you something else,
A little deeper?
And I don't need an answer.
Just sit with this.
What exactly are our comparisons actually comparing?
We know our own thoughts,
Our doubts,
Our fears,
And our uncertainties.
But another person's life is mostly what we see from the outside.
From the surface.
And from that,
What we create through our imagination.
As an image in the story.
Thought quietly creates an image of someone else.
Than another image of ourselves.
Then without even noticing it,
Compares the two.
Perhaps comparison doesn't compare people.
It compares our ideas about people.
We compare an idea of ourselves with an idea of someone else.
And perhaps every idea the mind creates is simply an interpretation.
Trying to understand.
That which can only ever be directly lived or experienced.
Perhaps the difficulty then is not that another person appears more successful.
More confident or happier.
Perhaps the difficulty begins the moment we believe the thoughts that tell us We are someone less than anybody else.
From there,
Comparison creates the feeling that something is missing.
Not because anything is actually missing.
But because this interpretation this comparison is believed.
But is that really true?
Or has thought simply created an image.
That it now believes to be real.
We spend so much of our life comparing an idea of ourselves with an idea of someone else.
And perhaps none of these ideas have ever been able to fully contain the potential,
The beauty.
The uniqueness of who we actually are.
Before comparison,
Before the thought.
I should be more like someone else.
What is here right now under your own feet,
In your own immediate aliveness and awareness of this experience?
That which is never needed comparison to simply be as it is.
Perhaps comparison has never really been showing you who you are.
It has been simply comparing one idea with another.
Which has only ever been an imagined reality.
And perhaps what you truly are has never been contained in either.
So perhaps your life has never been asking you to become someone else.
It has simply been inviting you to discover.
The quiet completeness of the you that has always been here.
Before any comparison was ever thought of or needed.
