Everybody look outside. Take a look. Trees, do you see a lot of trees and bushes? Now generally a mango tree is a very big tree and it spreads out. A coconut tree grows tall and gets taller than a mango tree. A papaya tree grows shorter, stays shorter and dies very young, but it makes fruit really quickly. Within 12 months a papaya tree makes fruit, and lots of fruit. Mango trees usually have to wait for seven years before it makes any fruit, but then it lives for 100 years. A papaya tree only lives for about 3-5 years.
Now let's say the papaya tree is in it's first year, making lots of fruit and it looks over to the little mango tree, only 2 years old and not making any fruit, and it says, "I'm better than you are." 20 years later, the mango tree is big and spread out and has lots of fruit, and it looks over and wonders what happened to the papaya tree, it's gone. "I must be better than that papaya tree." Try not to compete and compare yourself, especially with your partner. It is truly "left foot - right foot", you're not going to be dragging behind if you work on the practice.
Humility helps, also. Humility - we're not the best. Can we accept that? A lot of us don't want to accept that, we want to be the best. Can you accept not being the best? Can we accept following instead of leading?
Now when you think of this in other ways, it's actually often safer to follow. The person up front makes all the mistakes. We don't have to make the same mistakes. For me personally it was great having a brother who is two years older than me. I just watched them getting into trouble and I didn't do it. So following others in a relationship is not always something that is negative at all. As long as you think, "I am not as good as him, or I am not as good as her", then we're back on the conceit issue. We're back on thinking too much of the other person.
Now let's twist it around. Your partner is doing very well in one aspect of the practice. Oh good, can we say that's great? "Keep it going, keep it going, you're doing well!" Sympathetic Joy. If we're dragging behind in one area and the partner is doing very well, that's our opportunity to develop our Sympathetic Joy. Take inspiration from the people who are in front of you, whether it's your partner, your teacher, your other friends, whoever. Use it for inspiration, not for competition.
There's one type of competition we want in this type of practice, and only one type. Competing with ourselves. Are we doing as well as we can? Are we falling behind from what we've done before? Can we push our limits for what we're doing today? Competing with yourself. All of you have been involved in sports growing up, some sports are team events like soccer, basketball, and so on, as a team. Other sports like swimming and running are individual races.
You're all by yourself. Having been a swimmer I was all by myself. Yes, there were relay teams but my enjoyment was when I swam by myself. Winning against other swimmers was not the most important thing to me. I could win every race on the planet and it would not be as important to me as something else. The other thing that was more important as a swimmer was whether I personally improved my own time. Whether I improved myself. If I lost against everybody in the race, but my own time was the best I've ever done, wow, great, that's all that matters. Me competing against myself, not competing against the others. So this is something very important in the spiritual practice.
If you have a partner who happens to be in front in certain characteristics right now, great! Have nice thoughts about them. Have Sympathetic Joy and take that as an inspiration as to how you can make your practice better. And if you're out in front one day, ok, it's just the result of the practice, that's all. It's not anything to develop a big head over, it's simply the result of hard work. You're still not equal to the Buddha, right? Remember him? The guy who started this whole thing. None of us is equal to him yet. So there's no need at all to be thinking, "I'm so great because I'm ahead of somebody else." We're still lagging way behind somebody who lived on this planet, and thousands of other people as well. So the competition is within yourself, that's what we want to get going.