500 Words a Week - Running Your Own Race

Everyone is running their own race. With their own priorities, their own goals, their own challenges and boundaries. When we start to compare ourselves to others, we forget this.

There’s two points around this thinking of comparison I would like to discuss. The first is someone might be further along in their journey by sacrificing all the aspects of life you said you wouldn’t. How come we still then feel the pain of comparison?

“An extreme focus on any endeavour, to the exclusion of all else, often gives fantastic results in that domain of life, but if our loved ones get neglected or hurt in the process, is the sacrifice worth it?”

“So you have to ask yourself: what are you willing to give up, and is it worth it?”

- Russ Harris

If we don’t know what we aren’t willing to sacrifice, and don’t put boundaries in place, our pursuit of anything will slowly creep into all aspects of our life. Unknowingly we begin compromising our relationships with those around us, because we didn’t have the courage to say this is not what I’m willing to sacrifice. We may even begin compromising our own health, mentally and physically. We start neglecting ourselves and those around us. 

We don’t want to wake up one day and realise we sacrificed everything important to us in order to pursue something that upon reflection wasn’t that meaningful to us. Having strong boundaries, and remaining firm on what you aren’t willing to sacrifice, doesn’t mean you won’t get far in your pursuit. It just makes the pursuit healthier to us, we may even go further as these boundaries we have in place prevent feelings of burnout. They prevent us wrapping our whole identity in our pursuit as we know there are many other aspects to our life and who we are as a person. Therefore, we take less offence when challenged, and our whole sense of self worth isn’t wrapped up in whether we are subjectively performing well in our pursuit or not.

The second is, we mustn't let this comparison cause us to feel so disheartened that we stop trying to progress. Life works in mysterious ways. We never really know what’s around the corner. We just need to keep taking the next step forward. It’s natural to feel a little disheartened at times, it’s a common feeling we all experience. Yet we can’t let this feeling stop us. If we do, we become trapped in a cycle. We feel disheartened about our progress, so we stop. We then feel disheartened because we stopped. It’s a cycle of feeling bad about ourselves, causing us to feel worse about ourselves.

The only option we have is to keep moving forward. To keep showing up, despite the fact that it might feel we are going nowhere, despite the feelings of angst. It’s in these times of being able to show up when we don’t feel like it we start to get a sense of who we are and our character. It’s through this experience we begin to build confidence in ourselves, in understanding that we are the type of person that can keep showing up when the journey is getting difficult. When the path ahead looks uncertain and confusing, we are still tentatively moving forward. Trying to find our own path in life.