upward and downward
Photo is my brother and I when we were little.
I love the bunny - the cowboy boots. I have no idea who those kids were. We were little hoodlums.
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When encountering someone new, without a moments thought you size him or her up placing the person on a rung above or below you. Although this habit may seem innocuous it fuels an often imperceptible greed that constricts Love’s radius. Greed thrives on the illusion that good fortune is a scarce commodity. That anothers gain is your loss and vice versa. It leads to a guarded stance towards others that creates and reinforces distance. Greed makes you cling tightly to your own good outcomes, fearing anything that might make you lose a foothold on the rung on which you find yourself. You look down at those below you with pity, fear, or irritation and up at those above you with envy or desperation. You grab at opportunities to get more goods for yourself with little regard for who you may be pushing aside or harming along the way. Through the mere act of ranking others, greed slithers in to create a false social topography that utterly denies the inherent sameness and oneness across all people. The truth is there is no such ladder. When it comes to what matters most, others are neither beneath you or above you. Time and again studies show that the happiest among us are the ones that simply shed this pernicious habit of social comparison. When you see others through the lens of sameness, instead of through the lens of upward and downward comparisons, you come to recognize that others difficulties are also your own difficulties. Either at present or some past or plausible future moment. You also recognize that their good fortune doesn’t subtract from your own and it does you no harm whatsoever to celebrate it. Indeed you multiply your own riches when you do so.
Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D (Love 2.0, Chapter 7)
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