When we compare, we're bound to lose

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I am trying not to compare. Not stuffing. Not apple pie. Not last year with this year. Not table settings. Not houses. Not family rooms or family dynamics. Not anything.

Comparison, I've come to believe, is the eighth deadly sin.

I used to compare myself with Rosemary. We met in second grade. She had straight hair. Mine was curly. She wore skirts and sweaters. I wore frilly dresses. She had her very own kitchen drawer, which was filled with paper, books, paints, and crayons. I had to keep my things in a toy box in my room.

I was content with me until I met her. Then I wanted to be her. And, what do you know? Rose wanted to be me because she liked my curly hair and my mother's cupcakes. That's the way it is with people. We're always comparing, and then concluding that we'd be better off if we had this or that, or if we were someone else.

A friend buys a new house. A big, beautiful new house. And I don't want a new house. I don't even want to deal with the house I have. But after I see hers and all her artwork and cross-stitching and needlepoint and quilts and stenciling, I think, wow, look at all she's done. Why haven't I done this?

And then I come home to my own beautiful space and everything looks old and dull. Comparison does this.

We spend our lives comparing. Look at their garden, their cars, their kids, their resumes.

We compare yesterday with today: "The traffic is horrible. It didn't used to be."

Old songs with new songs: "There's no romance anymore."

Restaurants: "Last week's was better."

Movies: "I haven't been in 20 years."

My mother was in a coma for three months and lived the rest of her life disabled. For 17 years she was not the person she had been.

Comparison was a knife then that cut me up every time I was with her, every time I even thought about her, because I was constantly comparing who she was with who she had been. My mother was young. She laughed. She sang. She danced. She played with my son. Now she was suddenly old and in pain and confused and in a wheelchair. And because I compared, I saw only what she had lost and not what she still had.

And if I hadn't compared?

I might have found that my mother was still there in front of me.

Sal taught me this. "How can you spend so much time with a man who can't talk or do anything?" friends would ask when I visited Sal. He had Lou Gehrig's disease. He could do only two things, smile and move his eyes. He produced words on a computer with his eyes. That's how he communicated, letter by letter, three words a minute.

"Isn't it awful?" his friends said. And it was, for him and for Sal's family and for everyone who knew him before he got sick. But it wasn't so awful for me. Because with Sal I never compared. I didn't know him whole. I didn't know him when he skated and painted and danced. And so the Sal I knew was enough.

"Don't compare yourself to anyone but yourself," the nuns used to say years ago to the children in their charge. But even this is folly because children grow up and people grow old and there comes a time in everyone's life when we aren't as fast, or as able, or as something as we used to be.

Young children don't compare people. They've got it right. They simply love. They love their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents, and their caretakers no matter their age or the color of their hair, no matter if their father can't run or their grandfather can't walk or their mother is too sick to even hold them.

They love them anyway. They don't say, I wish my mother were prettier. I wish my father were taller. I wish we had last year's apple pie ...

They like this year's apple pie and all that they have, because they don't see what's missing. Instead they see all that remains.