This blog post is referencing Cam Church – The Unfairness of Life, which originally aired 05/29/2016. See the full episode of Cam Church there.
Life is unfair.
I know you know this. You have felt it. That specific frustration when you have worked for something for years and watched someone else get it effortlessly. That particular pain when the timing is all wrong. That guilt when you feel bad about your life even though “other people have it worse.”
I want to talk about all of it.
My Complaint
Recently I posted something in the UNICULT Facebook group. It was long and it was complaining. I erased it, not because I was wrong to feel what I felt, but because someone’s interpretation of it snapped me out of it and reminded me of how much I actually have.
But before I erased it, I felt it. And that part matters.
My specific unfairness: I have a super high level of ambition and things don’t come to pass as quickly as I want them to. I have been building UNICULT since 2012. The level of participation and recognition we have now, I expected this roughly three years ago. I work on something for years, emotionally give up, and then it finally arrives right when I have stopped expecting it. I get the thing, and feel strangely flat about it. Because by then, my mind is already three visions ahead.
That is its own kind of unfair.
You Are Allowed to Feel It
Here is what I want to say to you, and what I have to keep saying to myself:
You are allowed to feel like life is unfair.
Not in a place of permanent victimhood. Not in a way that becomes your whole story. But in the real, human, embodied way. Yes, this hurts. Yes this is hard. Yes I expected more by now.
When I was deep in depression, one of the things that kept me from healing was the shame around the feeling itself. I was not allowed to feel bad because I was privileged. There were sick children. There were people with real problems. My problems were not real enough to warrant pain.
That is a lie. A pervasive, damaging lie.
When we ignore our pain and say “I’m not allowed to feel that,” it doesn’t go away. It gets worse. It represses. It turns into something much harder to move through later. The path to near constant JOY does not go around the hard feelings. It goes through them.
The Swimming Dream
I had a dream recently about swimming. Me and someone I love were in a pool and a swimming instructor offered us a lesson. We said no. So instead we tried everything ourselves. Floaties, treading water, diving deep down to the bottom.
When I woke up I knew immediately: that is what we are supposed to do with our emotions.
Yes, the ideal is lounging on a floaty with a cabana drink, totally at peace. But sometimes you need to dive down deep. Look around down there. Feel what it is like at the bottom. It is not good to stay down there, you will drown. But going there, really going there, is not weakness. It is exploration. And when you come back up, the air hits different. The light looks different. You can see what you have.
Feel the darkness. Come back up. That is the practice.
The Luck Dragon
I picked up The Neverending Story the other day (the book, not the movie, the movie has nothing on it) and I found the passage that I needed.
Falkor the luck dragon and Atreyu are both poisoned. They have maybe an hour left to live. They are in the middle of nowhere. There is no help coming. And Falkor says:
“Everything will turn out all right. You will see.”
Atreyu says: “I can’t imagine how.”
Falkor says: “Neither can I. But that’s the wonderful part of it.”
That is the energy I want to carry. Not a denial of how bad it is. Not a toxic positivity that says “just be grateful!” Falkor knows he is dying. He does not pretend otherwise. But he holds, completely, the faith that it will be okay. He has no idea how. That is the point. He does not need to know how.
And then a little gnome appears with antidote. Of course it does.
We can never expect what comes next. And that is not a reason for despair. That is the most radical, most terrifying, most beautiful reason for faith.
You Can Be Happy. You Already Are.
One of my core teachings is this: You can be happy, in fact, you already are.
What I mean is: even in the hardest stretches of your life, there are slivers of time when you feel it. JOY exists in you already. It is not something you have to manufacture or earn. It is your natural state, interrupted by the noise of Earth.
The practice is: feel the hard thing fully. Dive down. Then come back up. Focus on the sliver of light. Let that grow.
On a cosmic level, I believe we chose every experience we are having. Every hardship was agreed to, on some level beyond this one, because of what it would make possible. That is a tough pill to swallow when things really hurt. I am not asking you to swallow it in those moments. I am just asking you to keep it in your pocket.
From this limited human perspective: yes, life is unfair. Feel it.
From the cosmic perspective: you are exactly where you need to be.
Both can be true at once.
UniBless. 🌀
You do not have to feel this alone.
UNICULT is a community of people who believe that JOY is your birthright, that ALL ONE means your healing matters, and that you are not broken for feeling like life is sometimes brutally unfair. We dive down together. We come back up together.
