Incomparable You
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
- - - Oscar Wilde
One of the most destructive things I do is compare myself to other people. I don’t do it purposely. It’s a bad habit. I work hard to break it and sometimes I do, but when I don't, I’m headed straight for the downward spiral.
It works both ways. If I think I’m better than someone else, my self-congratulatory attitude is certain to end in a swift and painful fall off the pedestal. If I think I’m worse than someone else, a far more often occurrence, I feel defeated and try unsuccessfully to claw myself back up. But this can all be avoided if I stop telling myself stories that aren't true. Not the stories that make up the plot of a good book or what we read to our children before they go to sleep. I’m talking about the negative stories we make up as we self-judge and compare and end up feeling like we don't measure up.
I became aware of how different we all are when I was in elementary school. There was a big snow storm, we could see it out of school room windows, when the teacher gave us each a sheet of white paper and scissors and asked us to cut out a design to make a snowflake. We folded and snipped our creations and when we were finished and unfolded them, she tacked them all onto a bulletin board. I looked at them with wonder. We had all started out with a white piece of paper, but each snowflake had individual shapes and patterns that we had chosen and no two were the same.
Human beings are like snowflakes. We’re all connected, all part of the human race, but we’re also different. We have unique chemical makeup, physical health, mental capabilities, interests and beliefs. Each of us is like an individual experiment with powerful emotions and a brand of creativity that is all our own. In the words of modern dance pioneer, Martha Graham:
Your expression is unique and it is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
As a species, we don't like pain and we search for pleasure. We want to be loved and we want to love other people but the ways we find what we're looking for are vastly different.
You may sit in meditation and I sit in front of a computer.
You paint and I dance.
You play the guitar and I listen to classical music.
You speak French and I speak English.
You cook and I eat. (Trust me. You wouldn't me to cook.)
You like to garden and I like to knit beautiful sweaters.
You have a husband and children. I live alone.
You like dogs. I like cats.
You have a great sense of direction. I can get lost on my own street.
None of the above are better or worse. They just are. Three weeks ago, I attended what was called a “chakra collage” workshop. A dear friend and wonderful artist, Stephanie Waisler, was the leader and around the perimeter of the room were boxes filled with magazine cutouts that matched the colors of the seven chakras. Once we chose a color, we rummaged through the corresponding cutouts and picked the ones we liked. We snipped at them, rearranged them, glued them together and although we had all chosen from the same boxes, our end results couldn’t have been more different. Each was beautiful in its own way and we had fun admiring and sharing them with each other. If we had compared our pieces and thought that we had come up short, that would have been untrue and it would have opened us up to a world of pain.
A spiritual leader once said, “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.” When we compare, we fold in on ourselves. Our hearts and our bodies become tight and we feel jealous. We question what we’re doing and we pay no attention to our intuition. Conversely, when we see everything for the individual wonder that it is, we open up. Our hearts and our bodies expand and we feel compassion. We drop into what we’re doing and we relax into the beauty that is all around us.
I marvel at the courage that some artists demonstrate in being innovative and unusual. In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky composed the music for the ballet, “The Rite of Spring,” he journeyed into a far away realm of the unconscious, a place he had never been before, where his music was driven solely by his gut feelings. During the first performance of his masterpiece, the audience disliked the dissonance of the music, the jerky movements of the dancers and the rapidly twittering sounds from the woodwind section. It just didn't sound like anything they’d ever heard before and a number of them walked out of the theater, disgusted. Stravinsky stood by his rare artistic expression that didn't compare to anyone else’s and since then, “The Rite of Spring” has become one of the most often recorded works in the worldwide classical repertoire.
If we can stop trying to be like someone else and learn to accept ourselves, exactly like we are, all that remains is beauty. Coco Chanel said, “Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.”