Yes, it isn’t, and the sooner we get rid of the idea that it is, the easier our lives will be.
You only have to turn on the TV or read the newspapers to see ample evidence of this. Why are you even able to read these words when thousands of children are starving in Africa?
Why are you worrying about your mortgage when trust fund kids are partying in Ibiza without a care in the world
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an article where I bemoan the horrible fates of those less fortunate. Nor will I talk about social injustice. But is one of the facts of life that you can’t escape from. Life isn’t “fair” in the technical sense of the word. There will always be some form of injustice, the haves and the have nots.
I’m going to put forth the notion that accepting this makes a world of difference. First we accept it. Then we go and change things.
We can’t choose our parents, and we can’t choose many things about ourselves – our race, gender, and sexual orientation. What we can choose though, is almost everything else.
I think that part of the problem is that we are taught since childhood that life SHOULD be fair. Good guys should win, bad guys should be punished. Hard work should be rewarded.
And sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes it is.
I don’t for one minute believe that we should stop striving for our principles. Fairness, equality and justice are the pillars of a just and fair-minded society. But we also have
to acknowledge that the world is imperfect and well…inherently unfair.
Martin Luther King once said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it tends towards justice.” The man got shot…but his dream outlived him to enrich the lives of many others.
For many years (also due to my own issues with self-esteem) I’ve struggled with this. Something will happen and it will be like I’m back in high school again, trying to
balance one columns of figures against another – find x, where x is the total of my existence measured against someone else’s. Once again it doesn’t quite work that way.
The circumstances of any one person’s life are beyond the means of anyone to calculate. Someone (and there will be someone) may be better off than you, and they may have worked less. Or maybe not. You can’t know the depths of karma, exactly how each person came to be. So…don’t think about it too much. Once accepted, focus on what you CAN do.
Don’t focus on what you can’t do anything about. Focus on what you CAN do something about.
There’s a great essay I read once (which unfortunately I can’t find now) about how we can “break our children’s hearts” And I don’t mean that romantically or negatively. All the essay said was that our duty as parents was to break our children’s hearts first, when we can explain to them how things and not let the world do it for us. When it’s a controlled detonation and not a complete breakdown.
And when we’ve done that – what then? Well, we pick ourselves off the ground, dust ourselves off and having accepted this fact about this great big wide world of ours… we go about trying to change it, that’s what.
Life is unfair. But that doesn’t mean it needs to keep being that way.