Tool for Tuesday: Life Isn’t Fair. Period.

The Canadian women’s soccer team was leading 3-2 against the Americans in the semi-finals at the Olympics. Canadian goalkeeper Erin McLeod caught a ball and fell on the grass. She took 4 seconds to get up, then took another 10 or 11 seconds to kick the ball to her teammates but the referee said she took too long. The tide of the game turned and the Canadians lost the game.

“We feel like we got robbed in this game,” McLeod said.

Life really isn’t fair. The best people don’t always win. The vacation week you waited for all year is a rainy washout. All the hard work you put into your job was erased in the economy. You are not going to retire with a bundle of money you put aside. You’re not going to retire. Your loved one dies too young. You step on dog crap. A guy runs a red light and plows into your car. Someone wins the lottery twice. Someone never wins at all.

Life isn’t fair. It just isn’t. And if we keep fighting that fact–wanting to smash fate in the face—then we’ll spend all our time feeling cheated and angry and bitter. If we want to transform our lives then we have to accept this fact.

Tool for Tuesday: Life really isn’t fair. Period. It isn’t always a question of luck or karma or the alignment of planets. It’s the willy-nilly, inchoate, random, ridiculous, disorderly order of things.

About dianabletter

Diana Bletter is the author of several books, including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award. Her novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins) was published in 2015. She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review, Times of Israel, and is a reporter for Israel21C, and many other publications. She is author of Big Up Yourself: It's About Time You Like Being You and The Mom Who Took off On Her Motorcycle, a memoir of her 10,000-mile motorcycle trip to Alaska and back to New York. She lives in a small beach village in Western Galilee, Israel, with her husband and family. She is a member of the local hevra kadisha, the burial circle, and a Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Druze women's group in the nearby town of Akko. And, she likes snowboarding and climbing trees.

View all posts by dianabletter →