IT'S NOT FAIR!
How often have you heard your kids (or someone else's kids) raise that particular whinge. You know what? Out of the mouths of babes and infants as the saying goes... or to put it another way: they're dead right. It isn't fair. Life.
I'm sure that we all sometimes feel that way even as adults. We might feel that we're doing everything we can and it's still not working. We might feel that if only they... the fabled, mythical "they" would do (...whatever it is we want them to do)... then it would all be grand and dandy.
Except, as we've discovered, quite often "they" won't. Even when "they" are quite specifically identifiable individuals and even when "it" is quite clearly in their job description, still they won't.
And it gets in the way.
And it's frustrating.
And they're paid to do this and I'm not and it's stopping me from doing what I'm paid to do.
And... and... and...
It's just not fair!
(Stomp. Sulk.)
Been there? Done that? Yeah...me too.
Or you watch people appearing to get more help than you do, or more leeway.
And, again, stomp, sulk, not fair.
Or they get the job or the promotion or the lottery win or...
Sometimes, we think things aren't fair when, actually, they are, but we just don't know the whole story. Sometimes people have worked really hard to get what looks like easy-pickings.
But equally, sometimes people do just get lucky. Sometimes we just get unlucky. For those times when despite everyone's best endeavours and best intentions things turn out in a way that isn't - by anyone's definition - actually "fair", when life has up-ended you, and you're in full toddler-strop mode or feeling even worse... here's a thought that's stuck with me from a Sci-Fi poet hero of mine:
"Take comfort in the unfairness of life... How much worse it would be, if the ills and disasters that befall us were because we truly deserved them." [Marcus Cole, Babylon 5]
If anything starts getting to you this week and you start to think to yourself "I don't deserve this." You're probably right, you probably don't. And that's probably a good thing.
At the very least, I find that recognising that and accepting it, helps me to stop taking it personally, and start just dealing with it.
