Fairness (part two)

I did write my last post before Joe Posnanski wrote the following....right?   

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of excuses. I’m not entirely sure why this is … maybe it’s because the older I get the more I appreciate that concept introduced to me when I was probably 7 years old, the concept that life isn’t fair. When I was young, I thought that this was simply a way for my parents to explain why I had to go to bed before Laverne and Shirley was on.

“That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair.”

As I got older, I realized that it was much more serious than that, that unfair things happen all the time in life, tragic things, awful things, sad things. Sometimes the bad guy runs off with the girl. Sometimes hard work doesn’t pay off. Sometimes cheaters prosper. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. “Life isn’t fair” took on a cruel meaning; it was all I had to explain a lot of the rotten stuff that happened.

But now, I don’t think of the expression that way. Now, I think of it as simply this: It’s our role in life to negotiate through the choppy waters. Because life isn’t fair. You have to bounce back when you get dealt an endless stream of thirteens at the blackjack table. You have to work through a DiMaggio streak of bad days because it’s your life and people don’t want to hear your problems. You have to finish the job because at the end of the day bosses don’t care about unanswered calls or flooded basements or pounding headaches or the overwhelming feeling you might have that something went very wrong somewhere along the way. Life isn’t fair. And the only way to deal with that is to overcome it.