Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
Oscar Wilde
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
Nancy Mitford
If you do not trust life to unfold, the mind takes over and it becomes a game of strategy, motivated by anxiety. This mistrust is unfair. Life has given us so much, and yet we do not trust it.
Mooji
Mooji’s comment above puts an interesting twist on the topic of fairness in life. Whereas most of us come out of the traps complaining about how unfair life is, he puts the onus on us to be fair in our appraisal of life. That is a novel approach.
Like many of you, I was confronted with adversity early in life. I consequently deduced that life was unfair. Nancy Mitford’s comment resonates with me as the fifth of ten children. Apart from the question of how fair it is, as a highly sensitive and introverted boy, to be thrown into the loud, cramped chaos of a twelve-person household, the modus operandi of my parents, teachers, and siblings was often, in my view, far from fair.
Questions piled up in my developing mind: How fair is it to have to share the attention of father and mother with nine further siblings? How fair is it to have to shoulder the responsibilities of a young adult while still a small child? Where is the fairness in having a punitive God who sees everything, takes note of all my failings (real or imagined), and will certainly send me to hell?
When growing up, my buddies were free to roam the forest down by the river while I had to stay in the back garden and look after my little siblings. Life in our familial pecking order was far from fair. `Get up and let your older brother sit down by the fire´ was something I could never really fathom.
Then came the unfairness of illness and death. My dad had just turned 50 when he fell ill. Cancer took him within six months, leaving a broken-hearted widow and a gaggle of young children behind. How fair was that? All the love and effort I had put into nursing him, moulding myself as best I could into the obedient oldest child at home, all of this seemed to have been in vain. Despite my best efforts to stave off the grim reaper, the day of parting came. Then I was left alone with my grief, everybody stunned, stewing silently in their own grief.
Five years later, in her early fifties, my mother succumbed to the same illness, though I believe it was really the broken heart……
And on and on and on.
Mooji is astute in pointing out that if you do not trust life to unfold, the mind takes over and it becomes a game of strategy, motivated by anxiety. Here is it important to differentiate between fear and anxiety.
As Dr Allen Berger points out in his latest book: `12 Essential Insights for Emotional Sobriety´: Fear and anxiety are very different emotions. Fear is based on an objective threat…. (whereas) anxiety is created by an active imagination rather than some threat we really face. We imagine some terrible thing happening in the future and project catastrophic outcomes. We call this awfulising.
This function of imagination creates a lot of anxiety. Anxiety is impossible to deal with when you treat it like it is fear. Anxiety is a bit like shadow boxing. There is no one there, – and the opponent, who you can never hit, gets to strike back with new and previously unheard-of blows….
In the cultivation of emotional sobriety, we first become the witness to our own patterns of thinking and feeling. This is achieved by taking inventory of self. We then learn that we can have our feelings without our feelings having, (i.e., controlling) us. We come to realise that there is a gap between impulse and riposte, and that we can begin to work with, and gradually take up conscious residence in, that gap.
Such transformation processes, if they are to succeed, comprises 20% insights and 80% practice. With regular daily practice, the gap between impulse and counterthrust expands, facilitating increasing possibilities of responding to whatever comes at us in a more aware, considered, kind, and loving manner.
Most attempts at transformation fizzle out quickly because the main emphasis is placed on the insights while the practice is not given sufficient attention. Practice needs to be embraced, implemented, and maintained in a consistent daily routine.
The Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality is an excellent example of the 20/80 rule in action. PQ can be applied to great effect in the attainment of emotional sobriety. Your mind is your best friend, reads the slogan across the top of the PQ website, but it can also be your worst enemy.
PQ refines Mental Fitness to the simple practice of training three mental muscles: The Saboteur Interceptor, the Sage Enhancer, and the Mind Command Muscle. When developed and maintained at high levels of fitness, these three muscles enable us to move from bondage to our impulses to consciously using our full mental and emotional capacity in the pursuit of fulfilling our full true human potential.
The rate of Saboteur hijacking falls dramatically once we begin to engage in a daily Mental Fitness regime. We become adept at creating harmony rather than chaos, operating in ease and flow instead of constantly self-sabotaging. When we disengage the handbrake of self-sabotage our relationships, health (both mental and physical), and levels of performance improve. We begin to experience peace of mind.
It was recently pointed out to me that insisting on life being fair as a form of entitlement. Entitlement is a fear-driven manifestation of the ego, insisting that life arrange itself around my personal egotistical needs and desires. The adage: We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are – comes to mind. How about replacing the term `unfair´ with `unfortunate´? Try it! You, too, might feel a shift, especially in the body.
Like many people engaged in the practice of transformation, I had, by mid life, painted myself into a corner. My juvenile strategy revealed itself as a fear-driven attempt to create a persona which might garner the love, acceptance, and sense of belonging that had not been forthcoming from my parents and adult carers in early childhood. I had adopted a false self. Unconsciously, I decided upon a strategy that would surely work provided the following conditions were met: I worked hard enough, life was fair, and the fulfilment of my basic emotional needs could be wrought from life.
That approach could be summed up as: Living life on my terms. It is a strategy which is not only doomed; it becomes pernicious by remaining invisible to the protagonist. Once transcended, it is very clear to see, even with a dash of humour. My retrospective analysis is that I got confused and began to believe that VIP stood for Very Important Patrick!
Over time, I discovered that nobody could work that hard, that misfortune is part and parcel of the human experience, and that fulfilment is not a goal that can be reached by means of frontal attack. It is, rather, the by-product of rediscovering the true, loving self, and living accordingly. The pursuit of happiness is an oxymoron.
Once I had crashed and burned in my early forties, the bankruptcy of my old approach became clear. A different strategy would be required. My emotional sobriety mentors, who had already made good progress in recovering their true selves, called this: Living life on life’s terms.
One element in this approach is to drop my insistence that life be fair. That does not imply that injustice or cruelty are things that can now be met with indifference. Quite the contrary. It simply means that, by accepting what is, engaging in on-going recovery that includes a daily Mental Fitness regime, and consistently doing the next right thing, we can redeem our true self from beneath the rubble of the failed personas, those now-defunct masks we had worn for so long, thus becoming the best possible version of who, in essence, we really are.
For a more detailed description of PQ, see: https://www.pq-mental-fitness.com/
