My great teacher - the wise old soul that is my still young daughter - recently helped set me right, yet again. I’ve recently become embroiled in a situation that seems unfair. It seems that I will be denied something that I feel I deserve and have a right to receive and I was railing about this great injustice, singing the ‘woe is me’ song loudly.
She let me vent for a moment, then she punctured my self-pity with this gem:
“It is not a question of what is fair, but what is needed.”
She is right. For me to claim that I should get something I feel I deserve suggests that I have all the information to make such a judgment. And I have no such thing. I only know what I know, and half of that is just informed by my biases, perceptions and no doubt selfish point of view.
But no matter how well reasoned, or reasonable, and regardless of how based in ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’ my viewpoint is, it is not a factor in the unfoldment of the Universe. It is just my take on one miniscule part of it, nothing more.
My judgments are almost always about how I can preserve and protect my own little ego - that part of myself that keeps me separate from everyone else. The Universe, on the other hand, operates on a Principle of Oneness that provides all life with everything that is needed for the optimum growth, being and fulfillment of all.
Consequently we do not always receive what we deem to be ‘fair’, but we always, without fail, receive what we need - in all aspects of the word: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
It is sometimes difficult to see this. This is because, to use my daughter’s brilliant analogy, life is like a marble cake, made up of half chocolate and half vanilla. Expecting everything in life to be ‘fair’ from our point of view, is like taking a slice of that marble cake and expecting it to contain equal proportions of vanilla and chocolate. The equality exists in the whole, but not necessarily in any particular part.
There will inevitably be times in our life when things seem unfair. But we must extend our view and see more of the big picture. We don’t get to decide the details, and that’s where a little bit of faith comes in.
Know this though: we will always have what we need, when we need it.
