Being oneself

 Sunday afternoon and nothing important on my mind. Some people like my friends, cousins, acquaintances, and colleagues kept flashing on my mind. And I started comparing myself with them that I’m better than some of them, worse than some of them. And then I started thinking…

We have been conditioned from the childhood to compare with others. Have you noticed that whenever we are with people or when we are thinking about them or we come across someone, there’s always a subtle or strong feeling of superiority or inferiority complex, we feel either we are better than them or worse than them. And that is one of the causes of unhappiness in our lives. Comparison has become our habit, a pattern of our mind, we don’t even make an effort to compare, it just automatically happens. And mostly we feel inferior in turn feeling depressed, sad, unfulfilled and frustrated. It is a by-product of comparison and it is a reality that we live in comparison.

Someone uploads pictures on Facebook while visiting exotic locations, in a good restaurant or somewhere else, we immediately feel why we are not there, we also want to visit such places, someone is physically better than us, we feel why I’m not good looking like him/her, someone has a better career than us, we feel he has a cool job and why I don’t have it, someone is living so many luxuries, why I don’t have it. So, there are numerous countless things for comparing.

Just think about how many people we come across in our day-to-day life and they have something which we don’t have. Actually, they may have something we don’t have and we may have something that they don’t have. It is impossible for a single person to have everything that people are having. It is a fact. Another fact of our mind is that it doesn’t recognize what we have but always hankers for what we don’t have, so there’s feeling of inferiority most of the times. We look for what we don’t have and when we feel someone is having it, we feel sad and depressed. Whether we feel superior or inferior, it is a trap of the ‘ego’ because ego always wants to be better than others, wants to feel superior. And that is one of the reason of dissatisfaction in our life. We need to be aware to drop this comparison. Everyone is unique, comparison with others is stupidity because we are not same. Each one is different and unique. Thank god! We have not been conditioned to compare with every living creature otherwise we might start comparing with birds, that they can fly and we can’t and so on. Thank god! We have been conditioned to compare with other human beings only. But do you compare apple with an orange? There is no comparison.

For enjoying ourselves and our life, I think we need to drop comparison. If a rose starts comparing itself to a lotus and imitating it, it won’t stay rose in the process and obviously, it can’t become a lotus. So, it loses itself. Everyone is unique so comparison is pointless. Imagine a garden where there are two trees next to each other, one is taller than the other. Had the shorter one kept comparing with the taller one, there would be no flowers and no fruits on it, it wouldn’t have flowered its potential because every time it would be seeing others only. The trees are peaceful, beautiful and contented because they don’t compare.

When we stop comparing, we become at ease with ourselves. In meditation, when I get connected to my inner core, I feel as if we all are one. One life, breathing and living within all of us. No question of comparison. But for now, we need to drop comparison when we feel we are doing it and start loving ourselves the way we are. We are amazing the way we are and should be loving ourselves.

For people who feel that they wouldn’t get the motivation to move ahead if they don’t compare with others, I think there’s no need to source your driving force from this negative habit. Obviously, learning from others is a different matter altogether.

I have always looked at myself, pointed finger at myself and made myself better than I was yesterday. I compare myself with my past and judge my growth. For the first time, I learnt friendship because no one is my competitor and friendship isn’t possible with competitors.

The source of my philosophy can be found at School of Life.