Comparisons

I read a good blog post today by Al Fox Carraway about not comparing ourselves to others. One of the key phrases she said was "Comparison is a poison we choose to drink."

Considering that I spent a large chunk of February struggling with winter in New Haven because I knew just how much better it could be, that idea gave me pause.

But the fact is, we have to make comparisons all the time. I compares prices when I shop. I compare recipes when I cook. I compare mouse trap locations when we are trying again to catch the mice that we know are there but still can't catch. It's part of normal life.

Of course, the danger comes when we start comparing ourselves to others, or one child to another, or one winter to another winter. It's not just that is the kind of poison that cankers our souls, that makes us forget how abundantly blessed we are and how everyone has their own challenges.

It's that we're usually wrong.

There was a little while where I felt like I was a horrible friend because every time someone complained to me, my brain would automatically jump to a contradicting statement they had made earlier. For example, if they said, "My baby finally slept through the night for the very first time," my brain would immediately jump to the time they had told me the same news 4 months earlier. I wouldn't say it, of course, but I felt like my congratulations or commiserations got all weird because the premise was faulty to begin with.

And of course, I am guilty of this despite trying to have a really good memory. Even in my last post when I said Joseph only colored once where he shouldn't but Matthew does any time he can, well, I know of at least one other time it happened.

And even if all my facts had been accurate, would they really have told the whole story? Would things had been different if Joseph had an older brother that liked to color and left markers around? Definitely.

So if for some reason I was trying to make a case that one toddler is a lot more difficult than the other, this example would not really strengthen my case. There are too many variables to really draw accurate conclusions.

This is true for just about everything. My data scientist husband Kevin occasionally remarks that most studies are useless unless the people doing it have had as much statistics and math as he has. There are just too many variables to control for, too much variation within groups, and such large sample sizes required that drawing a real conclusion is almost impossible.

In that case, why on earth would we ever make comparisons when we have so little data to work with? We have such faulty memories that it's practically pointless to say life was better in some other place or an earlier time. We have so much limited data when it comes to social media that we can't really say much beyond, "She posts more pictures of X than I do."

All that said . . . I still think Ann Arbor is a nicer place than New Haven. But, if my memory serves me well (haha), I also had higher expectations of Ann Arbor, so I still had hard days. (And I know for a fact I lost my patience more a year ago than now, so that's been an improvement, whether or not it's based on the presence of a 3-year-old in the house or not.) So really, life is probably as perfect now as it will ever be.

Well, actually, I'll probably prefer spring.


See also: The Best is Yet To Be