To be fair

To be fair

I was discouraged from being an artist as a young person because well,

how can you make a living selling paintings?

Van Gogh didn’t do so well at that.

Today I am an artist.

My mother encouraged me. What else could she do with me? Still the discouragements swirled around from outside, terrorizing me.

The impossibility of it! How would I support children if I had them?

To be fair, it’s a hard way to make a living.

Yet aren’t all the ways of making a living hard, especially for an artist?

If children come from God, no wonder we find it hard to adjust to life on earth. It would be sort of like a monkey raised by humans trying to adjust to life in the wild with other monkeys. That life would be hard to accept, and it would be hard to be accepted.

It’s been more than ten years since I’ve had a bath at home. I’ve been living in a tent. It seems unacceptable. But to be fair, I decided of my own free will to move out of the apartment with the bathtub and onto the land where we would build our house. To be fair, I’ve enjoyed alternative methods of staying clean. Still I’m very much looking forward to the day when I have a bathtub in my house and can take a bath at home.

I grow strawberries. I have a lovely patch. But I don’t eat strawberries. The chipmunks get them all. Once, I tried an unripe one. I was surprised that it wasn’t so bad. To be fair, I saw that the chipmunk left me half a ripe strawberry in the asparagus bed. The beginning of a fair share.

Fairness is one of the most basic ethical understandings known across species. But fairness is not easy to perceive. It’s unfairness that’s easy to see. “To be fair” is, or seems like, a sophisticated twist of perspective taking the narrator out of the middle. It’s not easy to get out of the middle because wherever I go, there I am telling my story.

It is easier to be grateful because it takes less intellectual power and sort of leads to the same thing: a better vision.

To be fair, a small piece of humble pie, or a little slice of sadness can often tilt the scales towards a beautiful balance.