Year of Gentleness, No. 6: Run Your Own Race

Here I am again, in this Year of Gentleness, once again inspired by my littles.

It has been a few months since I have written here. I could probably offer all the reasons why, but in the spirit of this particular post, I am going to resist the urge to explain the pace. Life has been lifeing, and apparently, this Year of Gentleness has included allowing the Coping Corner to be a little quieter too.

Lately, The Tortoise and the Hare has been on repeat in our house. We read it. We talk about it. We debate the important things: Who was faster? Why did the hare stop? How did the tortoise win? My girls are, of course, very invested in the ending. The tortoise wins. Slow and steady wins the race.

It is a story most of us have known since childhood. But somewhere around what felt like the hundredth retelling, I started paying attention to something different.

Around the same time, my brother preached a sermon about running your own race. His message was grounded in faith, but those words stayed with me well beyond the sermon. You do not have to share his faith, or any particular faith, to recognize something meaningful in the invitation to run your own race.

Simple enough. Except, I realized, many of us spend an awful lot of our race looking sideways.

The Trouble With Looking Sideways

Comparison is human. We look to other people to understand ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes that is useful. Seeing what someone else has done can inspire us, stretch our imagination, or remind us of what is possible.

But there is a subtle shift that can happen between noticing someone else's life and using it to measure our own.

Someone gets the promotion or starts the business. Someone gets married, has the baby, buys the house, takes the trip, or makes the move. Someone seems to be parenting better, managing more, looking happier, or somehow holding all the pieces together. Before long, we are doing the math: I thought I would be further along by now. Why is this taking me so long? Maybe I should be doing more.

The tricky thing about comparison is that it can make a perfectly reasonable pace feel inadequate. Nothing about our circumstances has changed, but somehow, after looking at someone else's life, ours feels different.

And this is where I started to hear The Tortoise and the Hare differently.

The tortoise never becomes the hare. He does not become faster because the hare is fast. He does not spend the story trying to move like someone he isn't. He simply moves at his own pace, and keeps going.

Maybe that is the part of the story I had been missing. There is something about that I want my girls to remember and, if I am being fair, something I want to remember too.

What Does This Season Require?

So much of adulthood seems to come with invisible timelines. By now, you should have figured out your career. By now, you should have found your person, started your family, bought something, built something, healed from something, gotten better at something.

Even when we reject those expectations intellectually, they can still find their way into how we judge ourselves.

As a psychologist, I think often about capacity. Our capacity is not fixed; it changes depending on what we are carrying. There are seasons when we can sprint. There are seasons when we are parenting, caregiving, grieving, healing, building, beginning again, or simply trying to keep too many balls in the air. There are times when we need to push ourselves and times when pushing harder is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Our pace can be information. It can tell us something about what we need, what matters right now, and whether the way we are living is actually sustainable.

This is where gentleness enters the conversation for me. Gentleness does not mean always choosing the slower path. It does not mean abandoning ambition, lowering every expectation, or letting ourselves off the hook whenever something is uncomfortable. Sometimes gentleness looks like rest. Other times it looks like courage, discipline, asking for help, setting a boundary, or finally doing the thing we have been avoiding.

Maybe the better question, then, is not simply Am I moving fast enough? but Does the way I am moving make sense for the life I am living right now?

Coming Back to Your Own Race

Running your own race does not require you to stop noticing other people. We need each other. Other people's lives can teach us, challenge us, and inspire us. Their accomplishments can even reveal possibilities we had not imagined for ourselves.

The work is learning how to notice someone else's progress without losing sight of our own lives.

Maybe someone's accomplishment brings up something you genuinely want. That is worth paying attention to. Maybe their news touches a disappointment about where you thought you would be by now. That is worth paying attention to as well. Comparison does not always need to be shut down; sometimes it needs to be understood.

So, the next time you catch yourself looking sideways, instead of immediately criticizing yourself or trying to talk yourself out of it, get curious. Ask yourself: What is this bringing up for me? Is there something here that I genuinely want, or am I responding to where I think I should be? What does my race need from me right now?

Then bring your attention back to your own lane, not because nobody else's life matters, but because yours deserves your attention too.

Finally…

Maybe my girls are right and the most important lesson is still the simplest one: keep going. But I hope, somewhere along the way, they learn something else too.

I hope they learn that there will always be people who move differently than they do, people who get there first, people whose strengths look nothing like theirs, and people whose paths seem easier from the outside. I hope they can admire those people without believing they need to become them.

I hope they learn to know themselves well enough to recognize when to push, when to rest, when to change course, and when something matters enough to keep going even when progress feels painfully slow.

And perhaps that is what I am still learning too.

My girls gave me slow and steady, and my brother gave me run your own race. Somewhere between those two lessons is one I want to carry with me through this Year of Gentleness:

Pay attention to the life that is actually yours.