I Was the Hobgoblin of Happiness

My random mental musings don’t follow a linear path. My final thought is rarely related to the first thought, and I often wonder how I even got there when I get there. It’s a lot like when you park your car and realize the drive was completely unconscious, but you arrived safely somehow.

Meditation teaches us to observe our thoughts, don’t dwell on them, but watch them as they come and go. That is absolutely the way my mind works in real time. My thoughts come; I see them and watch as they lead me to the next one.

Here’s where it started…

I was on my mountain bike in the middle of a 5 mile climb. It was hot, I wasn’t feeling great. I looked at my computer and realized I was solidly two minutes slower than I would normally be at that point in the ride. I was disappointed.

I knew there was no chance of a PR (at 55 I have pretty much given up on breaking records these days anyway) but should I push harder to try to make up the time and match previous efforts?

I seriously considered pushing harder to keep up with myself.

I was comparing myself to myself. And I decided I wasn’t measuring up.

Then I heard my husband’s voice in my head, “Comparison is the hobgoblin of happiness.” It’s one of his favorite sayings. I’ve said the same thing many times, just slightly different. It’s the “thief of joy.”

My mental free flow reminded me of a LinkedIn post I had just read. The author’s morning bike ride was almost ruined when he was passed by another rider. In the end, he still had a lovely morning with his wife, but he was momentarily disrupted by the errant tug of comparison.

But I hadn’t been passed. I was riding alone. In that moment the thief of my joy was ME.

So, I asked myself, “What would you need to enjoy this right now?”

The answer… more ease.

What if instead of pushing harder and suffering more, I slowed down and made less of an effort. Would I feel more joy?

As it turns out, the answer is YES.

A recurring theme for me is… I’m exhausted. War, intolerance, climate change, uncertainty, human suffering, work is hard right now, and the list goes on. It’s all weighing heavily on me. I try to transcend it, but the truth is I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared.

Some days it hits deeper than others. But I’ve been treating every day the same. Push. Get through. Endure. Wait it out. Trust.

My dad used to say, “Life is hard, Al. There are moments of joy, but life is hard.”

I think that’s true. And… we can create joy, but it takes an effort. We have to actively seek it out.  Hunt for it!  Because we see what we look for.  

So, for me on the bike that morning, joy arrived when I broke my pattern of pushing, enduring, and suffering through it to hit a self-imposed, artificially specific metric of my worthiness.

Ironically, my effort was easing up.

I told myself to go as slow as I needed to notice the sounds of the birds, my tires on the dirt, the breeze rustling the leaves instead of the hearing the constant narrative in my head pointing out how I wasn’t measuring up that day.

So, back to my question about comparison. Is it a motivator? A detractor? Does it inspire or derail?

Again, my answer is YES. It’s all of that, all at once.

Comparison doesn’t have to rob our joy. Maybe it’s the awareness of it that brings us closer to it.