Tag Archives: relationships

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When Getting Better Isn’t About Competition

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It makes me really mad when people are better at things at which I consider myself skilled. There is a myth out there (or, you know, a lie the world tells us. I get tired of saying it this way.) that says that everything everywhere at all times is a competition.

In this line of thinking, anyone who succeeds in something more than me is succeeding to my disadvantage. They are doing awesome things, and thus, I cannot. I don’t tend to care in things I don’t like. It doesn’t bother me that Kanye West is nominated for a bunch of Grammys. I don’t make music. He can step on me to get ahead in music all he wants. But if Kanye was my peer in school (which, by the way, would be pretty cool), you better believe that every time he got a better grade or a higher position in an organization, I would grow more annoyed and angry at him.

I don’t like that I am this way. There are a lot of people who aren’t. I was hanging out with a man while he did his job today. And he was so excited. A lot of his excitement came from the fact that his coworkers were some of the best in his field. That didn’t discourage him or make him jealous; it made him hungry for knowledge. Instead of being disappointed with his own achievements, he was trying to figure out how to use his peers’ deeper knowledge to better himself.

I liked that.

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An Incomplete Thought About Being Exotic According to Musical Tastes

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There’s a race going on, and it has nothing to do with running. It has to do with media consumption.

It used to be that when someone asked me about a show, a musician, a book, a movie, if I hadn’t consumed it, I became apologetic. I went out and found it immediately. I thought other people saw it as an affront to my intelligence or culture if I didn’t know what they were referencing. I had to be in on the conversation. It was important.

When you are constantly consuming media that people tell you is life-changing and essential, you start to learn something. You learn that everyone has their own list of life-changing and essential media. It’s not really the same for anyone.

I really like the Dave Matthews Band. I started listening to them in high school because a lot of my friends were. But then I grew attached to them because I liked them. Then I got to college. And almost no one I befriended listened to Dave Matthews Band. Everyone else became really exotic and different and sophisticated and cool because they listened to the xx and Bon Iver and Grizzly Bear and stuff like that.

What I failed to realize is that I was just as different and foreign to my Bon-Iver-listening friends as they were to me.

Media should never be a race. It should be enjoyable.

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Love is Not a Currency

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If I ever write a book, I think it’s going to be called Lies People Tell You. Because there are a lot of them, and it would be easy to come up with new chapters.

There’s a lie out there that says we can run out of love.

That’s not true.

Love is not a currency. Let me repeat that: Love is not a currency.

You can’t run out.

I wrote a post about a week ago about reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I have one major problem with the book – the assumption that love is a resource we can waste. In the first chapter, Joshua Harris tells this story about a girl’s nightmare. She’s at the altar on her wedding day and as her husband is saying his vows, all of the girls he’s slept with start walking and standing around them. I’m rather sure love has nothing to do with all of this.

I think the reasoning for this kind of fear comes mostly from Proverbs 4:23, which says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring  of life.” Nowhere does this verse say “guard your heart or else you won’t be able to give it to your future spouse.” But that’s how a lot of us read it. And, certainly, sometimes it feels like that’s what’s true. We fall in love for the first time, and when it ends, it feels like we will never be able to love at that level again. That’s all just faulty reasoning, though.

I think we are supposed to guard our hearts because we are special and valuable, not because our hearts and our love are finite. God wants us to share our specialty and value with people who deserve it, people who have earned it. That makes sense to me.

We have been offered everlasting, infinite love. The least we can do is offer that to others.