From Me to You

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 ar...