Of more general application?
At yoga yesterday, the instructor reminded us that it's not about competition - 'not even competition with yourself'.
Which I've been mulling over ever since.
Okay, at one level it's about not beating oneself up because e.g. last week you maintained a balance posture for, oh, 10 seconds at least, and this week all you do is wobble.
But it does seem to me to be about something we do to ourselves over all sorts of things, or at least I do, and I don't suppose I am unique.
I can get into a mild angstiness about 'why aren't people commenting like they did X while ago or on Y post'.
And there are all sorts of personal bests that I can see myself as having fallen off from, rather than maybe just doing different stuff or working at a different intensity.
Do I really want to have another year like the one in which I wrote a 90,000 word textbook, organised 1 small workshop-type conference and a fairly substantial strand of panels in a larger conference, produced 2 chapters for edited volumes and wrote 2 (I think it was) conference papers, and was also involved in the negotiations with the publisher over a joint-edited volume?
Not so much, really.
Ditto on the year in which, for an assortment of reasons, like one conference originally being scheduled about 18 months earlier and having to be deferred because of building works, and being subbed in at fairly short notice as a keynote speaker at another, and giving a general yes to participation in a symposium that was suddenly sprung upon me as happening at a rather inconvenient date bang next to another commitment, etc etc etc, I ended up presenting 15 papers (some of which were, it must be said, variant versions of the same paper) in various venues in 3 continents within 12 months.
I am sure there are other areas in which this could be seen to pertain and that past achievements are not necessarily something to measure current endeavours by.
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