I love competing.  I always have.  Both personally and professionally.  I especially love to win, but recently I’ve come to think differently about what winning means.  Many of the sports I play – which are largely individual competitions – are designed for losing.  There’s only one winner among the many who participate.  I’d sometimes look at the format of a competition and wonder if I should bother joining it when I have little to no chance of coming in first – and in fact, have a much greater chance of finishing last.  But what I’ve come to realize lately is that, in all these endeavors, the real competition is with myself.  That doesn’t mean I always win, but it does mean that, at times, it may appear that I was nowhere near the top of a leaderboard, yet I still crushed it!

My past weekend was quite full balancing work (Sunday) and fun (Saturday), both of which took priority over the blog.  Still, it won’t take long to share all that I need to this week.  My outdoor climbing season began on Saturday, and I am as inspired as ever!  I can tell this story here through the social media diary I’ve put together . . .

“You never know what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes until you are standing in them.”  This saying, which I first learned when I was a young boy, speaks to empathy, compassion, and acceptance and is generally a good lesson to live by.  But something misleading about the phrase that we must also know is that we can never walk in someone else’s shoes.  Shoes are a metaphor for life, and even those closest to us cannot know what it’s like to be us.  Yet we live in a world where, too often, we judge others based on their appearance whether we know them or not.  Shaming, bullying, and discrimination based on looks are as pervasive as ever.  Social media may be the epicenter of it, but don’t be fooled in thinking it isn’t everywhere else too.

The butterfly effect is a concept within chaos theory mathematics that means a small change in one state of being can be responsible for big differences in another.  The term was coined based on the idea that the wind pushed by a butterfly in one part of the world, could be responsible for starting a hurricane somewhere else.  As unlikely as that may be, I’ll explain here how true the concept is within the changes I made to my life – each starting with one small push.

If we’re lucky, we get to a point in life where we watch our parents age.  Mine, like many, can’t move the way they did when they were younger.  In fact, lately it’s clear they can’t move like they did five years ago, or even one year ago.  Some of this is due to medical issues beyond their control that would set anyone back.  What I’ve learned from this is that things will happen as I get older that might weaken or limit my abilities, but the fitter I am going into it, the better I will be coming out of it.