I feel embarrassed to admit that it has only been a week since I accepted that the world is not a fair place. I know, I know, it seems obvious and practical and realistic. But to me, it felt boring, this feeling. It rang of resignedness, of giving up, of failure (my least favourite word). I resolved to redeem myself from this tragic fate: I was going to stand up for what I believed in. Break, but never bend, that would be my motto for things I considered important were involved.
Thanks to circumstances currently beyond my understanding, I ended up watching Alain de Botton's charmingly witty and stealthily harsh TED Talk. It was about success and failure, mainly, but a bulk of the justification for not getting swayed by either was his argument that society and the world at large were too complex for a neatly ranked list or a normal curve. So we should be less quick to judge others, and infinitely more gentle when we pit ourselves against the world.
For someone who claims to be in touch with her instincts, it took a vaguely probabilistic allusion to convince me that Failure was heading my way, one way or the other. Then Hugh MacLeod took 49 PDF pages and around 100 of the normal A5 ones to tell me that the pain of making sacrifices will always hurt more than I think it would. I tend to feel sadness and anger way longer than happiness or joy. Maybe because I feel completely entitled to all happiness but not sadness.
If the Present is a Gift that I don't like, can I give it back? There are times when even the mathematically sound logic mentioned above does not help. I wallow in the Unfairness of It All; in the hollow certainty that there will be people who should have gotten more and even more people who should have gotten less. Maybe the notion of karma was created to address this thorn in our side. After all, as highly intelligent beings, we are more likely to accept something we don't or cannot understand. It is comforting to know that justice would eventually prevail in the universe. So what if I could not see it? He can.
It is stupid to expect to get what we deserve; what we think we deserve is our measure of our own worth, of, for a 30 year old, having spent 946 billion seconds with ourselves. The maximum someone like a parent or a sibling could have gotten with us would be half this number. Decisions like marriage or job options are made in a fraction of this time. How is it, then, that we can expect the world to give us our due, or worse still, constantly surprise us with its generosity?
Hence the copious literature available on defining our own measure of success; standing up for what we believe in; following our heart, da-da, da-da. In reality, it's the least resistant path to Failure. The difference is this: I think this path can be flipped that to get the most resistant path to Happiness. It's a surest shot of a path out there, and so, definitely worth taking.