Imagine the Olympics, where you have the three winners of a race standing on the podium: the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
Imagine what it’s like to be the silver medalist. If you’d been just one second faster, you could have won the gold! Damn! So close! Damn damn damn! Full of envy, you’d keep comparing yourself to the gold winner.
Now imagine what it’s like to be the bronze medalist. If you’d been just one second slower, you wouldn’t have won anything! Awesome! You’d be thrilled that you’re officially an Olympic medalist and get to stand on the winner’s podium.
Comparing up versus comparing down: Your happiness depends on where you’re focusing.
– Derek Sivers
You can read his full piece here.
Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore with it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
– Pema Chodron
Any time I get an uncomfortable thought or feeling, the first reaction is to bury it and to run away from it. While that's still the first instinct, when I remember the above phrase, I try to come back and sit with it, as they say in meditation. I am still not entirely sure what sit with it means but I try.
The reason I find this extremely interesting, besides the obvious personal development involved is to understand issues that my students have, like stress eating. It is a coping mechanism. We want to run away from discomfort and find solace in eating. That (obviously) doesn't work. And while I have guidelines and skills and what-not to help them with it, I don't think I have put it together in a well-rounded coaching programme yet.
But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
– Richard Feynman
My dad was always Feynman-this and Feynman-that growing up. I was the typical idiot kid and never paid attention, obviously. It was only when I came across the above quote that I started to pay real attention to him.
I don't think we will ever know the one true answer to how did this all come about? Is our entire universe in a lab somewhere in some other advanced being's universe? If so, where did THAT darn universe come from? Are we in the Matrix? What is the right question? Well, does it matter?! Maybe from a scientific perspective, maybe from curiosity, the wanting to know and all that. Of course. But does it REALLY matter? I don't think so. And can we comprehend the answer, let alone have it make any sense?
This is also why 42 is just pure, f***ing genius.
Have a good weekend!