Don't Measure Your Life "

A little brighter, with sight of a blue sky this campervan morning. The residue of overnight rain sits around me and there is, once more, the feeling and smell of drying earth on the air, the sky a wide and open pale vacant blue above me and I sit amongst a wee chill carried by a thin breeze. Crows chatter, a few house sparrows, but nature remains stubbornly quiet. Distant commuter rumble of car and train, and the crossing aeroplanes fills the gaps. In between drumming sessions I have been scrapping the surface of, for me, the newly discovered work of Kevin Kelly. Particularly one part in which he writes :

“ Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.”

A simple sentence, but don’t you just hate simple advice. I feel I spent a huge amount of my life comparing myself to others. Comparing who I was, my work, my hobbies, my looks, my body, my photographs, my drumming, my business, my counselling, basically everything, and as Roosevelt said it became the thief of my joy. Despite years of advice, thousands of words written by wise and not so wise authors, to the contrary I still find myself doing it from time to time. So I am going to be real here, this is not some offering to say that I am cured and we should all be cured cause it’s what everyone tells you and how magnificent my life is because I now know. This is a slugging it out in the trenches offering. That as much as I know the sage advice out there the reality is different. As I often say you can’t offer therapy if you don’t do therapy, you can’t ask people to be real if you’re not real yourself. So this morning is about acknowledging the struggle between comparing and living. The fact that it does prevent me from attempting stuff even in these allegedly mature years. I sometimes wonder what parts of my character, my work or my progress remains stunted because I keep measuring. That’s said I am much better than I was, but it does sneak up on you and stop you in your tracks sometime. It’s the reality of living. Lovely days people.

“ After so many years struggling to keep up with you, I finally realized we’re not even running the same race.” Scott Stabile.