This week I have been thinking alot about this idea of competition and how often it is used to strive for and achieve “success”. Now you may be thinking to yourself, what’s wrong with a little competition? After all I love a good sporting event or healthy banter at a Friday night game night. Now I am not necessarily speaking about that type of competition. The competition that I am speaking of is this idea that I have to go it alone and “get mine” before someone else does. This idea of rugged individualism that screams “every person for themselves”. The result is an energy that puts us in direct opposition to, and competition with, everyone and everything around us. This framework acts from the idea that there is a limited amount of good, abundance….actually a limited amount of everything. We then believe that we have to elbow and squeeze our way to get ours because there isn’t enough. Wow, has this mindset and ideology infiltrated so many things in our world. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be open to self improvement, growth, transformation, evolution. All of those things are good when we start from a space of already enough. It is when we begin the conversation from a space of frantic energy, lack mentality, rugged individualism at all cost, and competition at the expense of others that we begin to get sidetracked. We have all bought into this idea at some point or another. This idea that we are alone, that we are separate, that success and value is determined by external factors of acquisition, promotion, and “go it alone” at all cost. It is interesting when we begin to have honest and frank conversations about these frameworks, we can begin to see that they just don’t work anymore. Honestly, I am pretty sure they have never worked. They are lies. They are falsehoods. They are misperceptions. The more we lean into the truth, the more we understand the need and call for new frameworks, new beliefs, new ways of living and loving one another.
- Rev Ryan