Seth Godin is better at everything than I am at anything. He is more valuable to the world and, I suspect, to those who know him too.
He is larger and, in this, offers me a good view, as would any mountain.
And yet the fullness of self is not to be measured, only felt.
We feel small or full by occupying unique space, occupying it uniquely, the expanse from less than ourselves to more of ourselves an outward movement of internal being that takes place without analog.
Every question implies a larger question.
Why is comparison the source of difficulty?
Is really to ask:
Why is life so painful?
Writing is a dual process of saying what you think while figuring those thoughts out through what you write. Occasionally that doubleness twists into a generative helix. More often, like the third leg of a stool, it alerts you of something missing.
After I asked for suggestions, Sarah said I should write about what the people I work with bring up. Thus these past few days of my writing about comparison.
And yet I find that nothing I sent your way is what I talk with those people about. I’ve answered neither the small questions nor the big.
Maybe because it is not so much comparison people talk about but not being good enough or the fear of judgment or putting themselves out there.
Abstraction took me away from the case study of life and its pain.
Starting off queue I spun away from the matter.
But the writing did lead a friend to send me a poem (yesterday) that had more wisdom in it than I could ever have come up with myself.
And today Max writes to say that there are new attempts in science to move beyond physics, something which has to do with:
Distinguishability - can two things be determined to be the *same* or *different* - as the basis task.
Which I think I almost understand or, anyway reminds me of how you can diss an idea in science by saying it does not even have the value of being wrong.
Max also said,
Comparisons are likely fundamental to what it means to draw meaningful insights”
Which of course is true and which is a reminder that the pain of comparison—or envy or judgment or putting yourself out there—is how we expand, become distinguishable, grow ourselves as at least wrong
If you were raised by Venus and Serena's dad or grew up in one of those sci-fi/adventure movie laboratories where your every moment trained you to become a super-duper performer (usually in a killer) or were just born again into exactly the same situation knowing the thing you should maniacally focus on to become your peak self, what then?
Even a second time around I would never have become a great athlete or much of an assassin. But if reborn—and thus able to make the pain of comparison only a spur—maybe, if the mission were writing I could have ended up, if nothing so sizable a fourth-rate Emerson, then perhaps a fifth-rate Murakami . . .
Who writes of one of his characters:
Jealousy — at least as far as he understood it from his dream — was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn't make the decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.
The challenge is to know what we know: nothing outsizes the free heart.