CTR: Consider the Reason




I’m trying to get back in the habit of exercise, and found myself thinking a lot about comparisons while on the stationary bike today. You know how when you’re on a treadmill or some other machine, you can choose different programs to run? The machine makes the incline steeper or the pace faster for certain intervals of time. The changing difficulty levels are often represented by vertical bars on the machine’s screen.
As I looked down the row of machines today, some people were running fast, others were sweating hard and pushing the pedals slowly. How could I tell who was working the hardest? I realized that I couldn’t! Because the person who seems to be flying by might have zero incline, while the person barely moving might be climbing steep terrain. The person who is only walking might have already been through an intense workout and is finally doing a much-needed cool-down interval.
In a similar way, we don’t know what experiences other people are going through around us. And they don’t know what personal mountains we have conquered on any given day.
In the world of Mormon culture, for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the acronym CTR stands for “Choose the Right.” There are CTR rings that remind us to make good choices, sorta like WWJD is “What Would Jesus Do?” But I've come to think of CTR as something else. I like to think of it as “Consider the Reason.” When someone seems to underperform or be unkind, I tell myself to consider the reason the person might be acting that way. What if the program they are metaphorically running is an excruciating one?
Anyway, these thoughts really helped me not compare myself with others and get down on myself today, so I thought I’d share. When we feel like the person next to us is running much faster, we can remember that we’re each in the middle of our own unique mortality-exercise program. Joy Jones, the leader of Primary children in the LDS Church, made this point once by saying, “We can stop comparing our worst to everyone else’s best.” I’m going to end this week by working toward my own personal best! 

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