Midnight Mutterings | Competition

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

Tonight I had competition in writing this little column. Not with someone who wanted to write a better column than I could, though that’s certainly a possibility. No. Actually a probability. My competition tonight was with the full moon shining from my window, making a broad stripe on the water, quietly, softly calling, ‘Look at me. Keep looking at me. I am the most beautiful full moon you have ever seen.’ A million fold more beautiful than a blank screen, and some sticky laptop keys.’ That moon was in competition with what I needed to be doing, what I agreed to do. To send this little column to Lin before midnight.

Well, my agreement to write this column every two weeks did not pull me away from gazing at the moon. For hours. That moon laughing at my lack of self discipline, competed with my small obligation to do what I said I would. The full moon has come and gone, disappearing wherever full moons hide when we can’t see them anymore. When the lovely stripe on the water has disappeared for now. The full moon won the competition for my attention to a self-imposed responsibility. My will never had a chance.

But that’s not the kind of competition I meant to write about. I meant to write about the kind of competition between, among people to do something, be something better, maybe quicker than another human. The kind of competition in which winning by defeating another IS the reward.

I don’t understand competition. At least competition for its own sake. I didn’t even know about it until I was eight or nine years old, maybe older. I grew up in the middle of seventy acres of forest, the youngest of four children. There were no neighborhood kids, no neighborhood. My sibs were all older. I never considered competing with them. They were all larger, smarter than I was and I was smart enough to know I couldn’t do anything better or quicker than they could, If they competed against each other, I didn’t recognize it. They didn’t have anything I wanted, that I was lacking that I could recognize.

Eventually, of course, I went to school. I suppose there was competition there, but I didn’t recognize it. At least not in the early grades. I was an early reader so schoolwork was easy for me. For the first time there were kids my own age and size and I liked that, but I don’t recall wanting to make other kids sad about anything or angry with me. I was curious about them and wanted to find out about them and their lives and I seemed to know the best way to accomplish that was to show interest in them in a mild way. We all walked home from school. No school bus. No parental pick up. My family had a little house a few blocks from the city school where we met each day and stayed there until our father picked us up after his workday and drove us the six miles to our house in the woods. I was always the first one there which meant I got first dibs on the Kraft macaroni and cheese I cooked myself by standing on a chair. I had all I wanted and other snacks before my sibs showed up. Sometimes I walked a few blocks with other kids, but the only kid on my block went to a different school. We did play outside sometimes. (Incidentally, he grew up to be Armistead Maupin, writer—Tales of the City— and gay activist, but then he was just ‘Teddy.’)

There was one curious incident walking home: Sometimes I walked part way to that house on Forest Rd. with other kids. One day, a block from school, Betsy Ann Stevenson turned to me and promised mildly to ‘beat me up.’ I wasn’t completely sure what that entailed, or when, but it never transpired. Certainly, I didn’t have a clue how I would have responded as I was completely innocent of any experience with physical fighting.

As school went on, competition became more evident both in the classrooms and outside. I never really saw the point. It didn’t make me feel any better to do something better or worse than anyone else, but I did become aware of bragging and/or tears that occurred after competitive events. I was never interested in team sports but I did like to swim, water ski, and ride. Our little pony was too stubborn to be much fun with her foot dragging up the quarter mile driveway and race home where she tried to scrape me off on the clothesline on her way to the barn. When I was a young teenager, we acquired a gorgeous young mare, completely untrained. She belonged to my second sister, but ruined her on reputation on day one by unseating my sister. She became my horse then, and she landed me on the ground most days. Not by bucking, but shying from threats I never saw. She would just disappear from under me, and then nuzzle me as if she couldn’t understand why I was on the ground. She was my first transportation and meant I could get to the homes of two girls with horses who lived a mile or so on either side of our acreage. There was a dirt road that was long enough for us to race. I didn’t care about racing, of course, but my horse did. We never won a race and we never came in further back than second place. My horse clearly could have won every race, but she, like I, just wanted to keep up with the group. Her unpredictable willfulness meant that even though I could never stay in her saddle for long, I could ride any other horse without ending up on the ground. I did have some riding lessons at a local college, with time on reliable horses. And I competed in a horse show (one of my very rare competitive events). I admit I didn’t see the value of a shiny ribbon.

So now when I am olding, I see how much damage competition does in our culture. How win/lose mentality leaves lasting scars. In my school teaching days from graduate programs to primary classrooms, there was so much emphasis on competition and so little on collaboration. I had parents of first graders asking about their child’s ranking in the class and become frustrated that I had no idea. That I could tell them of incidents when their child helped another student academically or socially, how much progress their child was making working with other students on a project. How rewarding it was for children to see how much better they could accomplish a task or project when they worked together to produce something or understand a concept. In the real world of work and relationships, it seems to me that having to be a ‘winner’ is so much less rewarding in the end (because there is always another contest that one may lose) than working with another person or group and the bond that produces as well as the product of the effort.

Yes, I am aware of the concept of competing with oneself to be the ‘best’ at something, to be pleased with one’s growth ad achievement of one’s goals. I just can’t quite understand the value of, in the long run, defeating someone else in the process.