The Measure

The mea­sure of life is not where you started or ended but what you over­came. A thou­sand vari­ables sep­a­rate us, but the one thing that unites us is a will­ing­ness to sur­pass our lim­i­ta­tions. It is not a mat­ter of the super­fi­cials but of the strug­gles of the soul to rise above the pit­falls and prob­lems of life. No one starts off in exactly the same place. The con­test is about our­selves. Com­par­isons are unfair. We are not each other. God made us unique unto ourselves.

It is a waste of time to get lost in whin­ing or com­par­ing. The race is one that has to do with tak­ing our lim­i­ta­tions and doing some­thing cre­ative with them. When this life is over, I want to look back at the nooses around my spir­i­tual neck that I cut. I want to see where I rose above the crowd and went beyond the norms to the extra­or­di­nary. Most of all, I want to see how I chal­lenged myself.

We tend to com­pare con­de­scend­ingly down or hope­lessly up. As a result, we feel either supe­rior or infe­rior. What a waste! What counts is how we did with our­selves. The bat­tle is not with oth­ers but with our own sense of weak­ness. The spirit looks for oppor­tu­ni­ties to assert a higher course. You will find it in your fail­ures and despair.

When I grade, I do not com­pare stu­dents. I look to see how the indi­vid­ual has improved. If a stu­dent can pick him­self or her­self up and con­tinue on, it makes all of the dif­fer­ence in the world how I per­ceive them. The fail­ure to achieve is in the con­tent­ment to just go through the motions. Give me a roman­tic. Let me see some­one reach beyond their grasp. That is the A student.

It is not just another day in your life. It is an oppor­tu­nity to tran­scend your own limitations.