A golf shot hovers on the lip of the hole, and drops in. A penalty grazes the post on the inside, and there’s a new score, a change in the leading team, an entire country gains the honours. A horse wins the Grand National by a nose. An bullet-speed serve dusts the inside of the white line, by a centimeter, and a there’s a new Wimbledon Champion.
Fractions, Millimetres of a difference.
Enormous changes.
Fame, Fortunes, World Titles, won and lost by a whisker.
It happens at every level. There’s no accounting for it. You’ll hear the pundits, after the fact, rationalizing their viewpoints. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.
It’s life. It’s fair, and it’s unfair.
It’s fair for the team who win a championship after two or three years of wretched luck. It’s unfair for the team who came from behind and got wiped by a soft goal, an easy point, a lucky kick.
It’s life.
And we have to live with it.
It was unfair for the generations of two world wars. It’s fair for their progeny to reap the benefits of the peace for which they fought, and it’s unfair for the same innocent individuals of that generation to be mown down in a mosque, or a bank queue, or to lose their home to something that looks like international financial thuggery.
It’s life.
And in spite of the imbalance, what we do is make the most of who we are, where we are, with what we’ve got.
And it’s very likely that balance returns and prevails. For a while.
Rudyard Kipling once suggested,
'If you can dream, and not make dreams your master,
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can deal with triumph and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same,’
that we can aspire to civilization.
Good Man, Rudyard.
RSS Feed
