It wasn’t too long ago I was sitting in an audience at the Grand Hotel in Steamboat Springs, Colorado watching the graduation ceremony for the 2016 spring graduates of Colorado Mountain College. Amongst these energetic fun loving people was my brother. He is the first in my family to achieve this high a level of education. This day my brother walked away with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Sustainability Studies but I, too, walked away with something. I walked away with the most daunting challenge of my life. You see, before my brother walked up on that stage and grabbed his diploma (well, the folder that will someday hold it) there was a keynote speaker, Sean Kerrick Sullivan, an alumni of CMC. He spoke of the many challenges he faced during his lifetime. One of the greatest was when he had been paralyzed while surfing and miraculously enough he regained the use of his arms and legs. That, as heartless as this sounds, wasn’t what really hit home with me. At the end of his speech, he left a few very wise words with the audience that have forever changed my perception. He said, “Comparison is the theft of joy.”
Now let that sink in for a second, maybe reread that line, and think about it again. Think about all of your daily interactions, the thoughts you have when you are walking around the mall with your friends or the conversations people have around the dinner table. That statement rings true. For some reason or another, we live in a society where a majority of our thoughts, conversations, and actions are based on a comparison. Now think for a moment what life would be like if we didn’t compare things. Personally, I struggle to try to fathom that situation. Even in the act of thinking about the world without comparison, I am still comparing what could be to what is.
However, that is not the challenge I am presenting to you. Instead, I challenge each and every one of you to stop the material comparisons. Just because someone has a 2017 Chevy Silverado and you have a 1990 Volvo Sedan does NOT make you any less of a person. Nor does it matter if you get your nails done every two weeks at a salon and your best friend has never had that opportunity. We need to stop letting material items define who we are as people. Do the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the land we own, or our annual income really matter? In the end, you can’t take any of those things with you. If you give into material comparisons, then you’ve let yourself be robbed of being content with what you have already.
Each one of us is right where we need to be in that moment so unplug yourself, get out there and live. Stop comparing your worth, yourself, and your happiness to others because you are the only one who can determine your own joy. If you are not happy, then change something. I totally encourage doing a new activity completely outside your comfort zone. That’s where the adventure really begins.
