Just Keep Turning Up

I find the word justice to be contemptible. Perhaps this ramble can explain it…

Suppose you are in love. Perhaps you know them, or perhaps you just know they are out there somewhere. Because of this, you keep turning up. Wherever. They never show, but you keep turning up anyway. You keep wandering about, fishing for clues, and going with your gut. Just turning up.

Well, that’s life. That is what life is like for all of us. It’s the daily, unglamorous business of just turning up again. It is raw action unburdened by expectations, fueled purely by a quiet, stubborn hope.

The Trap of “Fairness”

But then suppose one day you wake up and have an epiphany regarding how unfair this all is. You look at the empty room, calculate the wasted hours, and realize how deeply unjust it feels. And so, in a fit of self-righteous clarity, you stop turning up.

Well, that’s justice. It marks the death of a soul and the birth of a victim.

If we look back hard enough, we can always find the exact places where that die was cast – the first betrayal, the first broken promise, the first time the world failed to deliver on its implicit contract. Those clarity-ridden moments are dangerous because they give our personal standards the permission to slip. We trade our agency for an invoice, demanding that the universe pay what it owes.

The Birth of a Victim

Once you stop, you change. Suddenly, you begin to think you are owed stuff, believing you’ve had a uniquely bad deal with an endless list of parties to blame. Consequently, you swap the open-ended vulnerability of showing up for the cold comfort of bookkeeping.

And once you acquire a taste for justice, you become something else again. You become picky, isolating, patronizing, and segregating. You morph into a cosmic auditor – harsh but fair, entirely correct, and utterly alone.

My advice: blame no one, measure no one, and just keep turning up.