During my conversations with my clients, friends, colleagues or close relatives I always find people talking about the injustices of life. “Who said life is fair?”, “It was never meant to be fair”,

“Life is unjust and I just experienced it”. I often comprehend with their stand about life and I always say “Yes, Life isn’t fair”. “It’s true”. But I also insist that we must recognize this, accept it and move on.

I also tend to hear many complains that people say they register with god. Many people who pray to the Almighty complain about their lives and ask him to solve their problems. Is he to intervene and solve the problems we ourselves create in the first place? Why should he interfere and address our wants when he know what we actually need? Anyways if life is not fair, the Almighty is one to be blamed.

In our regular day-to-day living we do complain about life being unfair to us and we do feel sorry for the current situation. We feel sorry for ourselves or for others thinking that life should be fair or for that matter life will be fair someday. We live on hope.

But life will never be fair and it won’t be. If we think too much about it we spend a lot of time wallowing in self-pity or pitying others and complaining about what’s wrong with life. We tend to join others in conversations where life is condemned and we discuss the injustices of it. We then all tend to agree that “It’s just not fair”. But what we do not realize is that Life is never intended to be fair.

So where do we go wrong and what change is expected? I think we should completely surrender to the fact that life is not fair. But why accept it? It is because unless you accept that fact and surrender to that fact it will not allow us to be free from feeling sorry for ourselves and for others. In this case unless we surrender it will not encourage us to do the very best we can with what we have.

It is not our life’s duty to make everything perfect for us. It’s actually our challenge. If we surrender to the fact that life is not fair we would not feel sorry for others as we will understand that everyone is dealt with a different hand, everyone has unique strengths and challenges and everyone has their own way to navigate and move on with their lives.

This thinking of complete surrender has probably made me stronger and helped me to deal with the problem of raising my only child as a single parent, the difficult decisions I made about myself, decisions I made about whom I should help or whom I can’t help, as well as my personal struggles during those times that I felt victimized or unfairly treated.

Life is unfair does not mean that we sit accepting what comes to us. It also does not mean that we should not do everything in our power to improve our own lives or the world around us as a whole. In fact we should make every attempt to make life better.

What I am saying is that when we do not comprehend that life is unfair we tend to pity ourselves and others in the process. Pitying anyone is a self-defeating emotion that does not help anyone except to make you feel worse than you already do.

Accepting that life is unfair brings more compassion for others and for ourselves. Empathy comes in as a strong emotion that brings love-kindness which touches each ones heart.

So next time before you indulge yourself in any conversation which condemns life and stresses on the fact of “how much unfair it is”; remind yourself that you have surrendered to this fact and let compassion and empathy flow through you. This will help you to get out of self-pity and also help you to react with a helpful action.

If we all agree that our present is the effect of our past actions and the future will be the effect of our present actions we will learn to acknowledge that how to stay happy is in our hands and we are solely responsible to carve our own future.

We all are sculptors! Believe it!

With grace and peace,

Dr. Vickram Aadityaa