At lunch yesterday, I heard that a very good friend has terminal illness and couldn’t shake the thought from my head the rest of the day. It was still there as I woke up this morning and so, after feeding all the babies, I decided to try to cleanse my mind by watching the horizon for this morning’s twilight.
So, I headed on down to the lake side and set the camera up to catch whatever the horizon might do for me.
I used to go to this particular spot on Lake Parker quite a lot but then they stuck a big light-pole right where I was shooting and screwed it up for me. Sure enough, I couldn’t take anything that had the pier in it as it was far too bright. This morning, it sent me out to the end of the pier to capture whatever I could there.
It was mostly a clear sky twilight but there was still a little bit of color that I managed to get and I have added some pics to the end of this blog.
I have to admit though that it didn’t really do much to clear my thoughts and as I drove away, the thought for today’s blog was still pretty clear in my head.
There is a phrase we often use in Ireland which consists of two words “in fairness”. Put it at the beginning of a statement and it makes it sound like you are attempting to establish fairness as a reason for whatever happened.
“In fairness, he deserved to win after all the effort he put in.”
“In fairness, we deserved something from that game the other night.”
But the unfortunate truth is that there is no such thing as fairness in this world. It is only a concept that we cling to when we are hung up in some kind of hope. We rarely look to it when we win or when something goes our way.
That life is inherently unfair should be no surprise to anyone. We experience life differently to where some people are born into wealth and power, others into poverty. Some people get great reward for their efforts in life while others don’t.
And some people live long lives while others don’t.
This is a simple reality, yet why do we think that fairness should play a part in any of it? As concepts go, it is about as flawed as humanity has come up with.
In fact, as I wrote, it is difficult for me to come up with one that is even a tad more ludicrous. Human nature with it’s sad clinging to unbridled hope, seems to pray for fairness at every turn.
I have written about the nonsensical nature of hope before, so I won’t talk about that again here.
People don’t get their just deserts. It isn’t all about swings and roundabouts. And things don’t all even out in the end.
These are fallacies that we try to console ourselves with when things don’t work out the way we want or need.
The prospect of fairness somewhere out there in our future gives us a false horizon to walk towards. For the vast majority of us, this only leads to further disappointment and discouragement.
The gate to hell is spoken of as having the words “abandon hope, all ye who enter here” but what they don’t tell us is that any sense of ultimate fairness needs to be abandoned too.
… just a thought.
