It's Not A Competition

What's not a competition?

Everything.

Unless it's explicitly stated...for instance, if you're playing a hockey game or trying to win an audition...it's not a competition. And even if it is explicitly stated, the more you can forget that fact, the better you'll probably do.

We have framed so many things as competitions. We're all competing for limited resources, for instance. Reframe that: there's enough.

There is, you know. There's enough on this planet, allocated properly, to give everyone a reasonably comfortable existence. If the U.S. placed a moratorium on military spending for EIGHT DAYS, that money could eliminate child poverty the world over for one year. In 2006, one percent of the world's population owned 40% of the world's wealth: by October of last year it was 50%.  THERE IS ENOUGH.

We've set up everything from school placements to job interviews to political campaigns as competitions. It even extends past death: our religions are duking it out for a heavenly reward, after all. This fosters us vs. them thinking at every step, which in turn leads to some people declaring themselves superior and others inferior, and the cycle repeats and repeats, ad infinitum.

See, our mindset is always based on one winner and many losers, when -- if we were a truly CIVILIZED species, we would automatically calibrate our every decision on maximizing the number of "winners", minimizing the number of "losers", and also minimizing the effect of "losses".

To tie this to the last post on entitlement, you don't accomplish this by eliminating losses altogether. It is important to keep score: if you don't, you lose sight of objective reality. There are times when that's a good thing to do. But not when personal growth is a possibility.

The idea, though, is to view failure as what it actually is.

We've got this persnickety idea in our heads that failure is the opposite of success. It isn't, not at all.  I've covered this in one of my best-received posts from last year on impostor syndrome. The short version is that even the most abject failure contains two critical elements necessary in success: effort, and knowledge ("well, now we know THAT didn't work!"). While failure is not necessary for success, I would argue that it makes success taste all the sweeter. And of course, without the experience of failure as teacher, the first experienced failure can very well drive a person insane. It seems ridiculous, but when you've been told all your life that there's no such thing....well, when the impossible becomes not just possible but personal...that's a hell of a shock to the system.

The older I get, the more I believe the only way to win at life is not to play. Or rather, to make up your own rules and play by them instead of the ones the world insists on. You'll get friction...oh, hell, you'll get lots of friction. But you'll also find people who play by similar rules, and those people, dear reader, are your tribe. Cherish them and hold them close. Not too close, mind: they are not your prisoners.

I've had people tell me two things in the past week that niggled at me, both having to do with love. Love, of course, is the focus of a lot of competition in the world. Not my world, but the world I have to negotiate.

The first thing was "I hope you find what you need". The second was "how could I compete with her?"

I hope you find what you need. This is phrased with the sweetest of intentions,  but it feels...wrong, somehow. I don't need anyone. I am a complete person in myself. My goal in any and all relationships is most beautifully stated as part of a wedding service published in CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, BOOK 3, by Neale Donald Walsch:

. . . you are not entering into this [relationship] for reasons of security . . . . . . that the only real security is not in owning or possessing, nor in being owned or possessed . . . . . .not in demanding or expecting, and not even in hoping, that what you think you need in life will be supplied by the other . . . . . .but rather, in knowing that everything you need in life . . . all the love, all the wisdom, all the insight, all the power, all the knowledge, all the understanding, all the nurturing, all the compassion, and all the strength . . . resides within you . . . . . . and that you are not marrying the other in hopes of getting these things, but in hopes of giving these gifts, that the other might have them in even greater abundance.

Also from that series, Book 2 this time:

You know...I seek the same things the rest of the world does:

• Power
• Fame 
• Success
• Winning
• The adulation of others
• Being better
• Having more
• Knowing how
• Knowing why

I just seek them to different ends:

• Power with, not power over
• Fame, not as an end in itself, but as a means to a much greater end that has nothing to do with me at all
• Success, not at others' expense, but as a tool to assist others
• Winning, not at any cost, but as something which costs others nothing, and even brings them gain
• The adulation of others, bearing in mind that others are at least as worthy of adulation
• Being better--not better than others (in a very high spiritual sense there are no others)--but better than I was yesterday
• Having more...to give
• Knowing how, and knowing why, not so I can hoard that knowledge, but so that I can share it. This blog is an ongoing example of that: I teach what I have to learn.

How can I compete with her?

You can't. Don't even try. She is her, after all. You've got no hope. I mean, she's perfect in her imperfections and she's a world unto herself,  a beautiful world of jungles and deserts and deep, deep oceans.  Just forget it.

And I told her the same thing about you. She can't compete with you. I told her to just give up. It's not even close.

And I'll tell both of you the same thing about someone else. 

IT ISN'T A COMPETITION. I love you for you--glorious you! I love her for her--wondrous her! 

This seems, I'm sorry, blatantly obvious to me, perhaps because I've lived with this worldview for so long. But to many people it's as if I'm announcing that 2+2= a red smelly noise. Even when they say they understand it, their words betray them. They insist I must love somebody "more", or that I can't really love two, or three, or x people at once, or that some day somebody will come along who will get all the love I have to give.

Never going to happen. You see...I don't play that game.