The Journey Is Yours

Yesterday during a conversation with a client, she offered up a phrase that her husband mentioned when she was comparing herself with another person:

“This journey is yours, not hers.”

Have you ever found yourself on a treadmill at a commercial gym, wedged between two other people treadmills?  Sure, there are individual televisions in front of each of you, but you can’t help but find yourself sneaking glances to see just how fast they have they’re going. I mean she’s on 6.5 when you’re at 4.5…

C’mon. You know you’ve done it. Then you inadvertently changed one of their t.v. stations with your remote.

No? Oh….well trust me - it’s awkward.  

We compare ourselves to other people all of the time. Friends we see on Facebook, other people we see at the gym, members of our own community and people all over the world. It’s human nature to compare.

I really struggled in college when I looked around at all of my friends and saw how clear they were about their career paths. They had plans to be physical therapists, and pharmacists, a teachers – and every day I found myself flailing, blindly putting one foot in front of the other with little idea of where I was headed.

It’s hard to appreciate our own journeys because we’re so close to them. It’s especially hard when we look at other people whom we see as being similar to ourselves doing the things that we feel as though we should be doing. They do it better, they do it faster, they do it – period – whatever your “it” may be.

And in spending our time lamenting all that we are not – have not done – we don’t appreciate the richness of our own journey – hell sometimes we don’t even acknowledge the hills and boulders and mountains we’ve climbed to be right here in this moment. We ignore the lessons our scars have taught us – the value of stopping to take a moment and run our thumbs over those scars and to remember all of the work we had to put into healing.

People out there may walk a similar path as a you. They may share your interests or your goals and they might be further along in the process. But you’re not walking her journey.

You’re walking on your own path.

Try not to forget that.