There Is No Such Thing As "Falling Behind"

I get annoyed when people tell me "My friend got his dream job, may be I am falling behind". " His company made $5 million this, may be I am falling behind".

The feeling of not to feel we are falling behind is hard to accept when we see people around us making what we perceive to be grave errors in their lives. This is hard to accept when we witness the people we love struggling and we want to show them the way out. This is hard to accept when we can’t stop judging and punishing ourselves for not being better, farther, and different.

When we are young, and before we really have a sense of autonomy, our lives are governed by a process, a specific order.

1.We know that we learn to crawl then walk.

2. We know that we learn to tie our shoes and put on our jackets.

3. We know that when we’re done with 2nd grade, we go to 3rd.

Our lives are built-in reinforcing systems. We are reinforced by our peers, by our family, by our grades. We know that the goal is to graduate, pursue a job, business or further education, get married, and have kids. Then, of course, life happens! We find that this one formula for an existence is just really a suggestion, one to guide us toward prosperity and not self-destruction.

We aren’t often given a lesson on how to be fulfilled. We aren’t often told what to do if we don’t quite get there when everyone else does, if our big milestones are letdowns, or most commonly, I checked off every box on the list and found that somehow I'm still empty inside.

Falling behind is an illusion, there is no such thing. There is not one way for your life to unfold. When we believe that it is possible to fall behind, we place limits on our lives.

Sometimes, we have to take the back road because the long way around teaches us what we need to know. Sometimes, we sit in our own pain for years before we start waking up and adjusting our behavior. Sometimes, what we learn from being different is more important than what we’d learn from fitting in. Sometimes, our greatest successes are decades in the making and there many examples of this. Sometimes, we do peak early. Sometimes, we need years of growth and self-discovery to decide what we need next. Sometimes, the point of the journey is to have different experiences, not just to cycle through a series of them until we decide on the one thing we want forevermore.

When we believe that it is possible to fall behind, it is because we think that the point of life is just to arrive at a certain series of check points… until we die!

Sometimes, the setback is the journey. Because the path you were on wasn’t going somewhere you wanted anyway. Sometimes, the setback is the wake up call you need to save your life. Because otherwise, you were barreling toward your own self-destruction. Sometimes, being different isn’t a bad thing. It means you’re on a journey of something deeper, and something bigger, that most people wouldn’t even dare to dream of.

Have you ever felt you are falling behind? What did you do about it?