I owe you nothing, you owe me nothing, we’re even. What is sent out comes back and what is received is reciprocated. Balance is maintained. The cake is cut evenly; everyone wins, everyone has their share. Fairness needs no justification, it is just fair. End of story. Sounds reasonable and harmless enough, right? What more could there possibly be to discuss?... But what happens when you apply this fairness principle more broadly and to less tangible things? What happens when you apply the fairness principle to your relating and to life in general, in order to determine how much is enough and who deserves what? What then?
I invite you to take a moment and zoom out from your life and scan it for places where you may be reducing unimpeded aliveness to a complex, interlocking series of input and output equations. Where are you running things via a subconscious accounting system? Meticulously tracking every transaction? With such a system in place, it is possible to distil even your closest relationships down to an input/output equation. This is a murderous trajectory to set out on, for what seeds would germinate in ground such as this? Are you expecting the seeds of Love, Intimacy and Connection to take root and thrive in a barren, transactional seedbed? If you are, then it is time to take a look at what is going on.
I invite you to go there, to that point of resistance where you would do a thing, but do not, because… because… why? What is happening for you here, in this place of not doing, where giving and receiving would happen if not for your ideas about what is fair and what is not? What?! How can this be? I hear you ask - fairness has always seemed such a pillar of decency, such a noble principle, yet here, it seems that upon closer inspection, it has actually begun to look like a barrier to giving and receiving freely, a barrier to the generous flow of human energy. What is really going on? What are you afraid of really?
There are many fears that could come up here, on the cusp of offering something of your value to the world. A couple of contenders are:
1. The fear of being taken for granted. Another person might not even notice your efforts - you had better hold back so that when you do offer your value, they really notice it. Or
2. The fear of being used up, of running out of gifts to give. After all, you only have so much energy, so much time and so many resources.
In both these examples, your ability to give is tied to what you will or have already received and is therefore tied back to your fairness programming. Somewhere along the way you have adopted a scarcity mindset where energy and attention is a personal resource that can be used up and therefore its outflow must be monitored, moderated and balanced with equivalent inputs.
You and the value you represent are gifts from the universe to itself. The idea of fairness and reciprocity is causing a rationing, a choking of the flow of this life force and not only yours, but all those whom your accounting system touches. This is a tough pill to swallow, that even acts of kindness may not have been fully genuine, because they are registering in your system as either a debt being repaid by you or the building up of credit that you will later require payment for. This is not in the spirit of the gift, this is not a recipe for unfolding your Being and calling forth other Beings into an eternally blossoming symphony of relating. It is a recipe for stilting and stunting. It is a thin, meagre gruel.
The fairness program not only gets in the way of you giving your gifts to the world, it also gets in the way of you receiving them from others. What if you receive too much? Get lazy? Become a burden? Owe more than you can repay? What if they think you are taking them for granted? Better to play it safe and not accept any offers.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” “No thank you, I will get it myself.”
For such an accounting system to operate, it requires faith in your ability to collect information objectively, accurately and consistently. However, you are not a machine and the assumption that you are objectively and consistently measuring inputs and outputs may not be so close to reality after all; in fact it could be some distance away. How can you be sure that your data collection methods are not shonky? You could well be prone to a tendency to skew the data in order to make the other look stingy, so that you can feel justified in your indignity and resentment; superiority fueled by your knowing that you have provided more value than them … And/or you might have a tendency to collect data that makes others look exceptionally good, so you can wallow delightfully in determined self-pity, justified in offering nothing because you know your offerings will never be good enough. So now this accounting program is starting to look less like an objective score sheet and more like a cover, a justification for whatever stories you concoct about yourself and others, a way to fuel resentment and warm your hands on the illusory glow of fairness while in reality keeping you and the people in your life stuck exactly where they are.
What powers this fairness and scarcity model is a deeply ingrained sense of what you think you or others deserve, of what has or has not been earned. You withhold your gifts because you’re not sure that the other deserves to receive them and you resist the gifts of others because you in turn are not sure that you are deserving of them, or are not willing to bear the debt that they will incur. This perspective can only exist if you choose to ignore the brain popping magnitude of the gifts of life that are all around you: a misty moody dawn, bird song, living soil, a smile, a tree, a swim in cool clear depths... What could you or I possibly do with our time and energy that could have earned any of these things? I may have paid for my surfboard, but it pales to insignificance when compared with the ocean, which is a staggering gift to receive; unearnable, unrepayable. There is nothing you or I can do to deserve the magical aliveness of this world …. And yet somehow it happened that the ludicrous, infinite abundance of life that we were born into has been taken for granted, treated as an anomaly and instead of the free flow of human energy, there is a severely constipated accounting system.
There is another way. It requires a shifting of the ground on which you stand. It requires as a starting point that you inhabit a space of overwhelming gratitude for these gifts. Such a large shift in perspective will inevitably send some ripples out into your life. You might screech with unbridled joy upon sight of the sun in the morning. When the shopkeeper asks how your day has been you may start to weep as you tell him about the beauty of the frog you found in your shoe that morning. The stars at night may cause you to stare agape for an unreasonable period. The fire’s dancing glow, so simple and so mysterious, may have its way with you for days on end … and then, from this place of intense gratitude for the impossibly generous gifts of life… it is a small thing to do, to accept the futility of earning, repaying and deserving and settle instead into giving and receiving freely and wholeheartedly, without strings and without calculation.
You may have assumed that the energy you draw on is yours, is generated by you at a certain rate, in certain conditions and from within your skin. What if that assumption was an illusion created by the limitations of the fairness program? What if this limited life energy that you have been so carefully dishing out is not actually yours and is not actually limited? What if, instead, that energy is actually an infinite river that is always there, always full, always flowing, always within arm’s reach? And what if, rather than needing to manufacture this stuff yourself, all that is required is to recognise that it is available, to fully occupy the space of gratitude and generosity and to reach out with a small glass prism, redirecting a single ray from this river of light into your life, splitting it at the same time into all the colours of your rainbow, directing it towards your brother, sister, neighbour, friend, partner, stranger... What might happen then?
I don’t know for sure and I suspect that something else will grow here. I am going to check it out. Are you coming?
This essay caused an epiphany in me.
Thank you James. My day will be different - Less accounting and more observant gratefulness and unreserved giving from me today.
I wrote a much better congratulatory comment but it didn't go through to substack - and now I can't paste from my memory bank. I look forward to reading all your writing.
Tears are coming, and sadness is rising up in me to feel "the brain popping magnitude of the gifts of life that are all around me!" Thank you James for these undoing words!