10 June 2015
One of the first lessons of growing up is learning “Don’t expect life to be fair!” As one poster on the topic says “If you expect life to be fair with you because you are fair, you’re fooling yourself. That’s like expecting the lion not to eat you because you didn’t eat him.” Events around seem to suggest life is not just unfair, at times it is quite illogical, extremely unpredictable and downright random.
Just this morning my husband shared a news-bite about a couple who paid a travel agent to book their tickets for London where they were to attend a family wedding. To their horror upon landing they were detained by the authorities at London airport for nearly seven hours as the tickets had been purchased on a stolen credit card! The travel agent glibly told them on the phone that he would refund their money once they returned. Meanwhile they had to purchase another set of tickets before they were let off. Each one of us would have dozens of such incidents to recount where life throws you a curve ball out of the blue! A road trip where all plans go awry because of vehicle breakdown or even an accident; a trip to the market ending at the police station to lodge an FIR because your phone/wallet was flicked; landing up in hospital because you broke your ankle dancing at a wedding celebration…all true stories and i could go on and on. Even the converse sometimes happens just as unexpectedly. A chance encounter on a flight may land you your dream job, a litigation you’ve been involved in for years suddenly gets resolved, you participate in a TV game show and win millions…real incidents happening to real people. How you choose to react and deal with such events is another matter…more importantly how do you explain away such happenings??
My grandmother who’d seen her own share of ups and downs used to say life’s much like the ancient Indian board game of Snakes and Ladders. When the dice is rolled your turn may stop at the mouth of the snake and the setback totally reverses your life’s fortunes, or if you are lucky to stop at the foot of a ladder you may climb up to heights you never could have imagined.
For me the question has always been…so who rolls the dice that decides my fate??
