Life is a Race! 🏃
When I was in school 🏫, I came across a line “Life is a Race” I then thought of an extension to it and modified it to “Life is a race , so face the race with pace and grace” . This meant that Life should be lived as if we are in a race, which will end when our life ends, and we should participate in the race with all efforts and should be mindful of time ⏰(pace/speed). The other important word in the line is “grace” which signifies that while in the “race of life” we must be honest, be thoughtful of others (do service to the unfortunate) and maintain a life of sobriety. The word ‘pace’ in the line also tells us that we should never let time slip away, we must act in a speedy manner and utilize time to its fullest.
Later , I further modified the line to “Life is a race, so face the race with pace and grace and remember to race with only yourself”, which signifies the importance of “self-improvement”. We humans, at large, give a lot of importance to competing with others, whereas our endeavour should be to keep improving ourself with better skills and morality. To elaborate the line further, we humans should not remain satisfied with the knowledge we have gained but strive to learn new skills or improve the skills we already have. We must not let any opportunity, to learn or improve 📈, go waste. Rather we should always be looking for opportunities of self-improvement or enhancement.
When we compete with others, we can be either, a winner or a looser but when we compete with ourself we will always be a winner 🏆 , as we will always be a better version of ourself. Even if we are not able to utilize(earn from) the new skill we atleast become a better skilled person. I am not suggesting that there should not be any competitions among humans, as that is a way to choose a better person for a given role. What I am suggesting is competition amongst humans should not be the priority, the priority should be improving the self, which will automatically make oneself, better placed in a competition 🤼 with others.
We humans 👭 , for becoming or being the ‘Best’ 🥇 have made ourself part of a never-ending consumption cycle. Since we, humans, measure our success with our material possessions and compete with others based on those possessions, such competitions only fuel’s an unhealthy race of consumption. This unhealthy consumption is also one of the reasons for our deteriorating climatic conditions. We need to consume, for living a comfortable life however we have turned that into a compeitition “I have more than the other”.
That is why ‘grace’ is the most important value of our lives. So, readers remember the line “Life is a race, so face the race with pace and grace and remember to race with only yourself”.
Author : J Banerjee
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