The Demand to Be Fair

I spent the first fifty years of my life with this phrase: it’s not fair. Turns out that my idea of fairness has very simple conditions. The outcome needs to be something I want to have happen. Anything other than that can be found to be unfair, and my mind can convince itself in microseconds of how righteous my “fairness” is.

When I joined the Navy, one of the first things they did was find what I considered the most useless and lazy person in our entire class and make him the boss. On the first afternoon we were to clean the school, his first move was to assign all of us jobs, then go to a vending machine and get himself some candy and a soda and sit down on the stairs while we worked.

I’d had a boss a few years before that, during my first job as a dishwasher. Her name was Joanne. In the middle of rush hour on a Friday night, she came back and found me sitting on a box, smoking a cigarette. She said, we’re out here busting our asses, and you’re sitting on yours. I’ve loved that and it’s exactly what I told the candy eating boss sitting on those stairs. Telling him off landed me in a lot of trouble and it took me years to realize they’d probably told him to do that, because the military is a lesson in you are not in charge.

That entire exercise did not teach me anything then. I was mad as hell because I’d gotten into trouble for complaining about a person who had the same rank as myself, but didn’t have the same responsibilities. That was over thirty years ago but the lesson still shows up almost daily, and I can find it in nearly every interaction with others.

I think I know what I want, but am I right? The morning I bought a 1937 Regal guitar, I regretted it before I had even gone and paid for it. The phone call accepting my offer didn’t comfort me at all. Only made me wish I’d never made an offer. Many times I’ve found out at the very moment of hearing “yes” that I did not want the very thing I was after. If I can’t even know what I want, how can I presume to know what another person should give me, much less what another person should change to satisfy what I think I want? How could I not see how selfish that is, to literally go around thinking that people should be modified in order to fit some ideal that I can’t even identify?

If I demand to be treated fairly, it is ego-based. It ignores reality and asks other people to not only know what I want but to be willing to do it. What I’m finally learning is that the concept bears no meaning for me in the real world.

One day I was pacing around my office talking on the phone and telling someone the Chinese parable about the man with a horse that runs away. The punchline is that he never calls a thing good or bad but instead says “maybe”. It dawned on me that in addition to not knowing whether something is good or bad, I realized it takes effort to label things as “good” or “bad”. It’s literally a cognitive step that I can avoid, if I’m fast enough. Somebody will die. I fall down and twist my ankle, lose my job, some body part will go bad, maybe my wife will leave me. And I’ll get a raise, and somebody will call and wish me a happy birthday and take me out to dinner. All are the same at the core. They are things happening. Some of them I like, some I don’t like. For the things I don’t like, falling down or the death of a loved one, the question is how much suffering I’m willing to go through before giving in to what’s here? Acceptance is on the way. I really just suffer long enough to realize that.

In Brian Tom O’Connor’s Awareness Games, he talks about visualizing your emotions outside your body. The idea is that emotions aren’t only mental. They exist in the body too. And if I looked deeply enough, which wasn’t very hard, I could locate the physical component of an emotion. It’s pretty easy to locate with anger. So I could find the emotion and then begin to work with it via my imagination. Is it bigger on the left or the right? What’s the shape of it? What’s the color? If I took it out of my body right now, what would that be like? What color would I paint it and what would the texture be like? Does it tingle or is it more nervous energy? I found I could not experience an emotion while simultaneously practicing this exercise. Anger or sadness or whatever would just be gone from this inspection.

I was a road raging maniac. Every driver needed to either get out of the passing lane or lose their license. And I felt strongly enough about that to admit that I wanted people to suffer for whatever wrongs I attributed to them. Another version of “fairness”, and it was the perfect place and way to test out the visualization.

I was coming home from work one day and just about to go under 540, near the Publix in Morrisville. Some guy cut right in front of me and I got really upset. Just as I started to let go of a mouthful of cussing, I remembered that book and started to imagine as many things about the physical sensation of my anger as I could think about. Then I noticed there was no anger at all. Confusing because my mind wasn’t accustomed to anger resolving this way and enlightening because I realized that being upset was only one of several available reactions. It wasn’t a choice I had conscious control over but one that I could make an effort to be aware of.

When I teach, one of the core principles I teach is not to fix things. Just to notice them. I approach this emotional awareness the same way. I’m never trying to not be upset. I’m never trying to fix anything or feel better. I instead just want to notice what I do feel. My mind takes care of the rest.

Hopefully you’re not holding the impression that I think I’ve solved this for myself. I haven’t. I’m a work in progress and I say “good” and “bad” a lot. I judge people all the time. Every time I’m aware of thinking or hearing “good” or “bad” come out of my mouth or into my mind, I don’t think “you stupid ass, you need to stop that.” I just think “well, that’s misplaced” and move on. Same for any judgments. Anything else would be another act of labeling. The same goes for fairness. The word has no meaning to me, though I still use it. The reality is much more simple. This is happening. And that’s really enough to say about it.

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Chris Sharp is a Grammy-winning rhythm guitarist (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) whose playing credits include Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, and John Hartford’s Stringband. He is also a Grammy-nominated producer. He co-founded The Nashville Collective with Matt Combs and is writing a memoir called Embracing the Paradox.