Who Do You Compare Yourself To?

My coach asked me this incredibly simple, yet pointed question:

“Who do you compare yourself to?”

Even just the way those words appeared in the email left me with such a wild feeling. What a fucking question. 

My first answer that I typed out was simply and powerfully, “Everyone.”

Yet as I began to hit the send button, I thought more about my reply. I wanted to allow myself a little more depth than that. In a way, do, we do compare ourselves to everyone me come across. 

We compare our clothes to that of the other person walking down the same street. We compare the food on our cart, to the collection of food of the person in front of us at the grocery store. “Wow I bought a lot more healthy items than she did.” I compare my spending/saving/investing habits to those around me. I compare my day to their day. Meaning I imagine if my time was ‘better spent’ than theirs. 

I also compare myself to my projection of other people’s opinions of me. If I do this, this is what they’ll say. If I do that, here is what they will think. I compare myself to the seat of where else I could be. What would my Paris self be doing right now? What would I be eating for breakfast if I lived in that big house over there? This is constant in my head, these states of of this and that. This constant pull of when else I could be, or could have or do. 

So, who do I compare myself to? Everyone and everything. Yet, coming to a stark realisation that I have the pen. Just as you have your pen. And the opinions of other are truly none of our business anyways. But who I truly seem to be comparing myself to is, myself. Or more subtly, my ego is constantly trying to remind myself of all the other things we could have, or be, or do. Who is doing the comparing? My ego tries to see if there is somewhere ‘better’ I can be. Some state in which would bring me ‘more’ than I have now. The grass is always greener, it beckons. Comparison is the thief of joy. 

What can we do in the face of such profound distractions from the happiness we have in the now? We practice. We allow. We listen. We observe. We have patience. We let it go. 

Alan Watts has this cool talk on dreaming. He mentions handing the power of controlling your dreams over to the dreamer. He states, if you had within your power, to dream 100 years time, at first you’d start your day rather ordinarily, and then you’d make further and further out gambles to what you’d let yourself dream. 

You’d dream up an your wildest scenarios, from coming close to death, to having all the riches a man could dream up. You would come out of that and take a deep breath and feel the feelings of how crazy aall of that time truly was. Once you had lived out that dream of 100 years of anything you want, you’d come back to realize that you’d actual dream of where you are now. 

“You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.” Alan Watts

Now knowing that you have dreamed yourself into your current position, and can dream yourself into anyone and anything, where will you go next? Who’s comparisons can you drop, knowing that you have the pen of your dreams? How can you turn your comparison into creativity od your dreams. Your comparisons are pointing you to things you wish you write into your own life. 

And maybe join me on my rabbit hole and ask yourself: 

Who do you compare yourself to?