running to stand still

"and so she woke up, she woke up
from where she was lying still,
said 'i, i gotta do something
about where i'm going'..."
--U2, running to stand still

our world is a mindset of constant escalating competition. new and larger challenges. more and bigger obstacles. extra and tougher opponents. whenever we're done with one, there's always another one.

our response is always to meet the competition. to match its expansion with our own. in the belief that however much it increases, we have to raise our game to overcome it.

the result is a neverending arms race of threats real and imagined versus ourselves and our determination, with us driving to find and reach and expend ever deeper and greater reserves of energy and effort and intensity and passion and will to meet our desire to win over all that come before us.

it can become an obsession. displacing everything else around us. to the extent that the competition means more than the victory, and the race is more than the end. so that we ignore what is happening and we lose sight of what we're doing. not just to the opposition but also to ourselves.

we forget the adage that a fire that burns bright also burns fast, and we miss the fact that we only have so much to burn. we have limits. we can be consumed. we can be burned out. even before we have lit much, if anything, in the darkness.

which is why it's important to hold to perspective, to keep in context, everything that is happening and everything that we're doing. so that we can realize the meaning of competition as more than a victory and the race as more than its own end. so that we can understand beyond that where we're going and how we're getting there and, more importantly, know why.

because the world is about more than just will; it's also about wisdom.

the wisdom to make whatever we do and whatever we have and whatever we are go as far and as high and as great as we think can be humanly possible, even to the extent that it goes beyond our expectation and surpasses our comprehension and transcends our imagination and lifts us sometimes somehow somewhere someway incredibly and improbably yet assuredly and definitively so that we can reach the inhumanly impossible and can then approach the glory that is the supremely divine.

the wisdom to make a difference.

otherwise, we're just running to stand still.