Ever since we were young, we’ve been asked to compete, to make sure that we’re the best at everything, to ensure that we are always at the top. For most of us, it starts when we’re young; we are told to be the best in class or get first place in sports and stuff like that. We were not taught how to come in second, to be happy that someone else is better than you.
Normally when we end up not winning something or coming in second, we often find fault with the person who is ‘better’ than us. Even if they do truly deserve to win, we would make it a point to find as many faults and reasons as to why that person should have lost to us instead. I’m sure you’d agree that sometimes we just have to accept that there’s someone better than us at some things.
But even now, some of you would probably be stuck at the phrase ‘…to be happy that someone else is better than you’. It might not make sense to you at all. How could you be happy when you didn’t win? Sure, they might be better than you, but why would you be happy about it?
This is the problem with competition. It shows how self-centered we are. It shows us that in the end we only want ourselves to win and no one else. Many people would deny it, but let’s be real, how many of us can truly put our hands to our Hearts and say that we are truly happy that the person who was “better than us” ended up winning instead of ourselves?
Even I’m still learning how to do that. I haven’t mastered the art of being able to feel pure joy that the better person won. But I comfort myself by saying that at least I am aware of how I feel and I’m taking effort to correct it.
I know that at one point of time, if I lost at anything, I would automatically start finding all the things the winning team or person did wrong. All the little, minuscule errors they made, and lists of all the ways they could have cheated would start popping into my head. My senses would make sure that none of their faults would go unnoticed.
And normally I wouldn’t be doing this alone. Many people, whether from my team or another would agree and contribute that the winning team deserved to lose. We were so blinded by our need to compete and win, that we started believing that there must have been some kind of conspiracy against us or something.
After a while, I started becoming aware of the Laws of Nature (
www.ascendancepro.com), especially in this area, the Law of Energy Returns Back to Source; which said that everything I did, said or thought would eventually come back to me.
So, I imagined that if the tables were turned, how would I feel if I deserved to win and yet was pelted with the sticks and stones of negative comments saying that I wasn’t good enough? So, after that, I started taking conscious effort not to say anything negative about someone else who deserved what they got. I realized that I was just being jealous of someone else’s achievements before.
So did I stop criticizing people completely? Nope.
Well, I did try but it wasn’t so easy. You see, even though I was taking the extra effort not to be mean and jealous, the people around me were still going on about how unfair it was, and that the winning person, still did not deserve to win!
It took me a while to stop commenting on these kind of things completely, and come out from those cycles of hate and negativity. The people around me at that time were just reflections of my old habit patterns, so I obviously couldn’t get mad at them even the slightest bit. Instead, I felt bad for them. Because eventually I learnt how to escape the cycle, while they still live in it. Hating on those who are better than them. And why do they do that? Because the fear of failure and the need to win is rooted so deeply in them, that they can’t comprehend that they lost. They don’t believe that they didn’t win and so they try to see why it is they lost. But instead of correcting themselves, they blame the world and everyone else for being unfair.
I know, it sounds sad, and kinda lame, but in that situation, winning really does mean everything. It takes time and patience to learn from it and get out of it. I was there, I know how it’s like to not want to lose. But like my mentor always says (
www.elangothiyagu.com), “You are only truly over it when you are able to see them happy and successful without your emotions interfering”.
- Harsha