Yours Competitively

 What I can, I will. What I can't, I will Still try. What I never can,  I will Still Struggle to try. But never give up!!!! 

This motto is what I see, experience and feel around me. Why lie? But to an extent within me too. I know my capacities and limitations. Where my expertise begins and where it ends. In this spectrum, I exihibit various frequencies of results. Some good, some satisfactory while some improvable. There are no bad frequencies. You just fall off the spectrum. But that's not bad. So I flap, waddle, swim in safe waters where every wave is known, every tide is gauged and measured. Safe because these are my over the years practiced and over-practiced skills. I'm a potential competitor to every new urchin that is forming on the rock. I'm a threat to the larva that's just hatched or that is still carrying a part of it's egg given a scary opportunity to slid back into the shell. My interactions with these chicklings decide whether I'm their predator or their guide or competitor. Whoever I'm to them, I'm still superior. What I do of my superiority is a matter of fact how the waters and its survivors will evolve. Still me trying to outdo the weaker, is no way a superior or a competitor but a mere loser who eventually falls in her own eyes! 

Today big or small, old or new, every trying contestant is a Competition. A bold competition that sees you in the eye and pricks your sight.  Competition, as I see, could be of three levels-one with your peers, two with your superiors, three with yourself. Competition with peers gives two things-if won a feeling of satisfaction and desire to try more whereas if lost a feeling of hopelessness with or without the desire to try again. Competition with superiors leads to a false sense of dejection if lost because you are in no ways competing in your spectrum. You fall off the spectrum. If you win, there is again this ultimate sense of pride of conquering the impossible. You move to higher realms of competition. Finally, the competition with self. You are competing with an older version of your own strengths, capacities and limitations. You are competing at the seventh minute with the sixth, today with yesterday and this year with last year.  For believers of karma, its a step ahead-out doing yourself in every birth. If we wish to we can internalize the other two competitions. Instead of competing with peers, we let our each single ability to compete with other ability. My writing competes with my medical skills, at the end to see who delivered better. Whether the reader was satisfied or the patient. Each skill of mine learns from the other what different the better one did to succeed. The struggle can move from being healthy to unhealthy. If one ability destroys the other and wins, still at large I'm the winner. If one ability carries the other along and keeps sharing winning space seasonally and timely then I'm the undisputed winner. 

External competition suggests there is lack of commodities and growth factors. Internal competition explores your abundant unknown, untickled productive zones. External competition shows you a false upper limit achieved by somebody's limited capacities. Internal competition changes the definition of horizons, ever-broadening, ever-growing. But never ceasing. Internal competition is beyond age, trends and market analysis. It's your own movement starting after 4months, 4years or 4 decades. It's comforting yet not cosy. It's reliable yet not laid back. It's passionate yet not destructively aggressive. It's a Rat Race where cats are not competing. It's only one  rat running to achieve its own dreams and desires. 

In an internal competition, I don't encroach upon someone else's survival. I mark my own boundaries and shift my paradigms according to need and convinence. Not taking it too far, let me give you one of the nature's best example. A leopard never hunts in the territory of a lion pride. The leopards are solitary, elusive animals either they ambush or stock their prey. Strongest of all the jungle cats they can climb trees, camoflague and hide in dense of bushes. Very different from its cousin the lion-king of the jungle. Yet female leopards will not give birth to their cubs in even a hospitable lion territory.  You consider it a losing weakness or a winning strength is upto you.

 Talent maybe a base for competition not a cause. Leaving you with a wonderful quote I read few days back, 

" You may not be the most talented in the room but definitely be the most competitive."