Is it bad manners to engage in a debate with your students early in the morning on some abstract notion of what comparison implies and whether it should be used in encouraging self and/or others? I am not sure.

In any case it is a sort of manners I am now learning to navigate with grace and tact — such manners are not something people can teach you, a sense of what it means to uplift and guide and inspire another person without putting someone down (either yourself or a third party). It is a sense you develop as you allow yourself to feel the somatic, psychological, and spiritual impact words have on you, in addition to the rational and the emotional.

What does your body feel when someone you know as a friend tells you — out of the blue — that they want to meld bodies with you? Which version of you responds first when your professor looks at your designs, shakes his head with a scowl, and mutters “no, no, this is all wrong”? How do you communicate (even with yourself!) when someone says a single phrase that lets loose a wild, roaring river of realizations and thoughts within your soul and leaves you pacing like a caged lion, hands shaking for thirty delirious minutes, unable to type or speak or conceptualize the idea of simply sitting down?

When we say things like “wow, that is amazing — I would never be able to do that,” it is simply the reversal of something like “you are incompetent, see how much better I did with mine.” How can one be used without implying the other is also acceptable, given the same underlying framework gives form to both? — the senseless framework of thinking we are in competition, that it is rational to compare two individual human beings in judgements of right/wrong, good/bad, better/best, that there is value in stepping on a body or soul to raise self or another higher.

Let reality speak for itself — if I bailed off a climb, I know what sort of climber I am regardless of where I rank in relation to the fellow climbing next to me. Let the work be judged on its own merits, in light of the care and attention and context that brought it into existence — why does it matter that there is a banana taped to the wall besides a Rembrandt, has the meaning of beauty and skill and depth of expression changed simply because oh, there is something else to compare the painting to now?

See how pointless and potentially destructive praise given in terms of comparison may be! We move the goal of becoming better to that of becoming better than the person beside us. We now set our eyes on those running beside us than on the running itself — or on the finish line. It is no longer enough to have tried our best, or to have done the thing well: we must have others know every last drop of suffering we have gone through, understand every sense in which we have bested the others attempting the same feat, sense every moment of our greatness in comparison to the others around us.

(We will not poke the bear of the inflated ego that must inject itself into every comment it gives on others and on the world: that itself should be a clear enough reason for why this sort of approach is less than desirable. Why cannot someone simply do well, be beautiful, say something smart (or stupid) without it being somehow tied to how we are or was or could be?)

I see no reason for putting anyone down to lift another up. The business of giving and receiving, of being alive and making more alive, is simply not thus conducted.