...and on

There is a reason that we, as parents, are charged with the task of teaching our children that life isn't fair.

It's not.

In fact, there will be times in their lives where it seems anything but fair.  I know that there have been times in my life where fairness was such a foreign notion that it hardly existed in the distance at all.  I still believed it to be there, present for someone else, though, and there is where I was wrong.  We tend to perceive that it's perhaps less fair for us than for others, when that's the biggest fallacy of them all.  The notion of fairness requires that things are indeed "fair" for someone.

Life isn't fair for any of us.

There are just times we don't see it, we don't realize it, we aren't privy to the truth or reality.  We're somehow protected from the unfairness of it all.

Until we're not.

What happened in Connecticut on Friday wasn't fair.  To those victims or their families.  Patently unfair.

What happened to my father, the fathers of my friends, the children of my friends, my friend undergoing surgery right now isn't fair.  Their bodies turned on them, cancer formed.  It's not fair.  Nothing about it is fair.

A woman was killed two nights ago at an intersection I can see from my house.  My uncle died on his way to work one morning in much the same way.  It's not fair.

A friend trying to pick up the pieces of her life this very moment, realizing that what she had hasn't been there in some time and it's gone now.  It's not fair.

Losing a baby.  Struggling with depression.  Dealing with addiction in someone you love. It's not fair.

But it is life.

And life isn't fair.

What life does, as cruel as it seems at times to those of us living the unfairness, is that it goes on.

...and on.

It urges us forward.

It forces routine.

It keeps us grounded.

It gives us meaning.

It makes us hope.

Life.Goes.On.