Whether born out of our moral upbringings or imagined by our logical minds, the sense of fairness has a vast control over our attention spans. We constantly battle with how unfair life can be – as if fairness is a desired and attainable state.

At our club racing, our handicapper has a difficult time grading riders so that everyone has a fair chance of winning. Yet we all know and learn to accept that racing just is not fair for everyone. No matter how hard the handicapper tries, someone will cry foul and complain about the unfairness of their grading.

With handicapping, it is a matter of getting close enough – but never getting there. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but it will never be any different. There is a whole lot more unfairness then fairness. I even say that fairness is so fleeting that it may as well not exist at all.

You see, fairness is like a rainbow. It happens when an uncanny sequence of events co-exist. Who would have thought that you can have sunshine and rain at the same time – and both at the same place!. Yet, this is what it takes to produce the rainbow.

And just as the rainbow promises a pot of gold at its end and you can never get close enough to find out if it is true or not, fairness promises a perfect world that we can never get to.

Rainbows materialise when least expected and do not hang around for long. Most of the time, you get either sun or rain. Or something in between. Rainbows come out to tease your senses every now and then – and it is just a reminder that freaky things can happen sometimes. But never all the time.

So, if you spot a glimpse of fairness in your life, know that it will not last for long. It will revert back to unfairness with no prompting or any intervention on your part. Just like the rainbow.

I used to expect fairness as the norm – and cursed when my life seemed to hide all signs that justice always prevailed.

Now I believe that like the rainbow, it is the exception to the rule. It just means that when shit happens most of the time – it is just the natural way that my life story is supposed to pan out. Now, I just enjoy the shit more than I used to….