Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long. And in the end? It’s only with yourself ~ ‘Sunscreen’
There are times when I would dearly love to know when all the world became a competitive stage. We have become so focused on who gets what, who stole what, who acquired the top job or the prettiest girl. Has the world truly never left behind the clique-centered high-mindedess that was high school? Or is this constant drive to prove points to the world some only semi-dormant part of human nature that rears it’s head when anything that could be perceived as a threat strays across it’s path?
Because life isn’t a game you can ‘win’. Not really. All your victories, accomplishments, petty points proven and high dollar purchases; they do nothing to bring out the best in the world or in yourself. And you can’t take any of them with you. The loved ones who will one day weep for our departure are not going to remember how many arguments we won or lost, how many times we were proven right, how much we did or did not spend on holiday gifts, or how many times we clobbered our partner at a game of chess. No one is going to care about how much we ‘won’. They’re going to remember the laughter, the smiles, the warm-heartedness and the quiet strength we hopefully brought to the world. The games played for fun and the gifts wrapped with joy.
After all, let’s face it, it’s not as if any of us are going to get out of this alive, so we may as well be kind to each other.
If winning – even if you are the only one competing – becomes everything to you, if everything becomes about checks and balances, if the vicious glee of victory becomes the only joy you have in your life, then all too soon you may find yourself standing on a playing field surrounding b emptiness. Too late to go back and change that fatal decision to win at all costs.
Too often, I have seen people desperately cling to a battle they know to be over. The weapons have long rusted and the ground has been salted, but there they still stand’ among the carnage of the smoking wreckage – screaming into the void that it’s not over till they say it is. That the battle is not won until their anger has been righteously appeased on their terms. It’s not over until everyone involved accepts that.
Hanging onto a fight long over merely by holding on to that frightening, painfully cleansing, anger. While denying doing any such thing.
Watching, unseeing, as that dark pall, that driving all-consuming need to have victory and control in all things pulls them from everything else. Roots them to that spot, unable to progress backwards or forwards; it drains them of who they were until only the anger and the need to conquer what they see as its cause is left. Seeping from their pores, lodging behind their eyes.
The do win, eventually, these people. They may even be happy; or think they are. Until they turn from the battlefield and realize there is no one left to share their victory, no one left to congratulate them. Not a soul, not a friend, not a co-worker, not even that girl with flowers in her hair who swore she would never leave.
All gone, pushed away moment by moment by the refusal to let go of the fight. Driven from the centre field to the sidelines, and eventually away altogether.
And so the cycle starts again.
Do not fall into the trap of seeing every moment of life as a competition. Do not become one of those people that loses themselves from the inside out. Do not put yourself in a potion to lose everything for a victory that means nothing, when what this this troubled world needs most of all in these rattled times is people who are willing to walk away from the fight and embrace the rest of their life instead.
The race is long, the battle is weary, and in the end, it truly is only with yourself….
Because life is not about winning, or proving a point.
Life is about living.