Life is Fair

I did it to myself. Oh, I won't ever say the reaction by the other person was ever my doing, because it wasn't. Their reaction is always their choice. However, my choice of putting myself in a particular situation is always my doing and I have to own up to it. Otherwise, I become blamey and give my energy away to someone who likely doesn't deserve it in that moment.

And that is what taking responsibility (being accountable) for my own life looks like.

I started writing this piece about two months ago and, for the life of me, I can't recall what the situation was I had placed myself in to generate the thought. That probably says something about the life-altering importance of what it was. Whatever the choice then, it's odd how circumstance seems to rotate around some ethereal Maypole until it feels as if your past life (situation) is flashing in front of your eyes... again.

Haven't I been here before?

I was out doing my thing the other day. You know... getting a thing-a-ma-hooey for the whats-it-for so I can do the hokey pokey and shake it all about. While I'm wandering the aisles of some warehouse-ish, florescent box like an Irish Setter scurrying to and fro with my nose nosing and my ears earing and looking for whatever it is I'm looking for, I overhear a couple having a rather heated, though pointedly hushed, discussion in the next aisle. It wasn't anything I haven't heard before. ~sniff~ Or smelled, for that matter. It's pretty easy to smell bullshit these days. I grew up hearing and smelling it.

She was trying to reason with him and it was getting nowhere. He was blaming her for forcing him to go shopping and putting him in a bad mood.

He said... she said... they said... then no-one said.

At some level, if he had taken responsibility for his actions (that is... he chose to be there in the first place and he chose to be in a bad mood), the foray into the big box store with huge packages of stuff you can't use in a lifetime may have gone much simpler and much, much more joyously.

Far too often we look at life as unfair when it isn't life which has put us in a particular situation in the first place.

Our choices put us there.

If I look at every situation I'm in as a choice I have made, then it follows I can make another choice to correct course or to backtrack. At no point am I compelled to stick with a decision to the bitter end simply because I, someone else or societal pressure believes I should “suck it up and stick it out”. I always retain the choice to opt out. I'm always allowed to say "Oops".

Life happens because we choose to be where we are.

Life isn't “doing it to us”. Life is supporting our decisions based on the choices we make.

Life is fair.

If you choose to live in misery when it was your choice to be there in the first place, awesome! More power to you! I'm just not sticking around to see the show.

Amen... or something along those lines.