Do not Measure Others by Yourself | Daily Meditation-November 29, 2021

Today’s Quotation:

Believe all the good you can of everyone.  Do not measure others by yourself.  If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune.  Envy no one, and you need envy no one.

William Hazlitt

Today’s Meditation:

Sometimes we start to think that the way we think of others is somehow justified by their lot in life. Do not measure others by yourself. After all, we’re often surrounded by people who judge others based on their wealth, their lack of wealth, their good fortune, or their bad fortune.  But the way we measure, look at others usually is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves, how our own lives are going on the inside, where it truly counts.  While believing negative things about others helps some people to justify or rationalize their own bad fortune or lack of success, when those beliefs are founded on untruths they tend to pull us down to levels that we really shouldn’t be at if we want to be healthy in our spirits and our hearts.

Some people have been incredibly fortunate in life–let them be fortunate!  Allow them their luck without envying them, and focus on improving yourself and your own life.  If we all can work on the way we do things ourselves and not worry about what others do or how they do it, we’ll all be much happier.  If we look at our own lives realistically, we start to realize just how fortunate we are to have the things we have, but once we start to compare ourselves to those who have more, we start to lose the appreciation we could be feeling.

Life is for living, not for comparing.  Envy keeps us trapped in the feeling that we’re somehow lacking, when in truth we’re not.  Let’s focus on what we have and realize that our lot in life is what we make it–we are not helpless victims of some sort of arbitrary decisions made by God or life.  I have wealth in different forms than other people have wealth, and I hope that I always will appreciate all that I have without diminishing it by comparing it to what others have.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Why do so many people spend so much time comparing themselves to others?

2.  What purpose do such comparisons serve?

3.  How can we focus more strongly on our own good fortune and less on the good fortune of others that may seem better than our own?

For further thought:

Jealousy is based on a feeling of inadequacy and a lack of self-worth.  The best way to handle the jealousy is to concentrate on loving yourself.

Louise L. Hay

Credit: Living Life Fully