It seems that often I fall short,
My merits, very few:
And I could be much better in
The things I daily do.

You keep a constant tally where
I’m way behind, it’s true:
But you have different rules for me
Than those you have

For you

---

We are born, I think, to a sense of justice. How good it is, is another thing altogether.

Children are keenly aware of deviations from what they perceive as “fairness”. This is usually framed as some sort of equality: they deserve equal shares of food, toys, time, whatever. It is possible, of course, that they learn this from their parents or other children: when I say “born to a sense of justice” rather than “born with a sense of justice” I am simply saying I don’t know how we get it, just that we end up with one.

Justice and equality are different words for a reason, however. There is a fair amount of overlap in the concepts, but they are not the same. Let me see if I can illustrate.

Relationships between people have a couple of major dimensions*: intimacy (more or less close) and status (who is more or less in charge). Parents and children can be very close (high on the intimacy scale) but very unequal in terms of status (the parent is in charge). This is not normally perceived as “unfair” even though the relationships are “unequal”, at least in terms of status.

In everyday life, the owner of a house or a business establishment has more “status” (i.e., direct power to influence choices) than others may, in that domain, and that is not normally perceived, in itself, an unjust thing.

Cutting past definitional matters, then, we get to the frequent problem with people’s sense of justice: namely, that while we tend to be keenly aware of unfair advantages others may have, we are blissfully unaware of any unfair advantages we ourselves may enjoy. So justice becomes a very unbalanced and one-sided sort of thing.

The most obvious examples of that sort of thing are what are called “double standards”, when people have a series of rules that they expect others to live by, while they themselves do not. People with double-standards can fairly be called hypocrites.

I have known people in my life who, in their own eyes, have never done anything wrong. They can argue, hour upon hour, for why they were justified in acting in ways they condemn in others. In other words, they don’t support double-standards, they just argue they aren’t really doing them.

I’m a mathematician in real life. The odds of a person always being right in all disputed matters are infinitesimal. So if you think you are always right, you are, among other things, really bad at math.

But, I suppose, differences in mathematical ability are just one among many ways that life, itself, is unfair.

---

* This idea of relationships is derived from the work of Professor Deborah Tannen.

“Mistakes were made,” I heard them say,
“The public was misled” —
I think it was them who had done those things,
But they never really

Said

---

I don’t care for fighting in relationships, so, where possible, I have no opinions. I’m fine with wherever we go for dinner, I’m fine with whatever my wife wants for furniture or decor. When I play games with my grandchildren, they can pick the games. I dislike conflict; for that reason, I avoid doing anything with large groups of people, since there are inevitably differences of opinion.

I was not originally conflict averse: I have come to be this way over time. As a child, teen, and twenty-something, I embraced conflict. I liked the challenge. I was part of the debate team in junior high and high school, which is nothing but arguing. I then carried those skills everywhere I went, arguing with people about sports, politics, religion, morality, and even music. I was quite a charmer.

When I started working at the company I work for now, things started to change. I have to deal with a considerable amount of conflict at work. I can do it. However, the amount I deal with professionally is enough for me: I don’t need more of it outside of work.

As such, I’ve become rather passive in many areas of my life, and that’s now many people know me. i don’t usually hear the word “passive”, I’m more likely to hear myself described as “easygoing”. I am not easygoing. Going anywhere is not easy for me if other people are involved. My passivity and willingness to go along are interpreted by people as something other than it actually is: conflict avoidance.

I enjoy spending time by myself now more than I ever have. It allows me to be active, making all of my own choices.

I read a book recently that gave me some pause. It was talking about male/female communication differences, and raised the point that conversational negotiation is part of the intimacy ritual for many women. Deciding on things together creates a sort of closeness.

Oh, no. Things I do to make the relationship better, like avoiding conflict, might actually be making it worse.

Sigh.

I know that conflict is inevitable among people, and that a certain amount, done the right way, is healthy. I also know that passivity, when it involves pretense, is not honest.

[whispers] You see, I really do care where we go for dinner… [/whispers]

We’re meant to live in wonder,
But hide, sometimes, in doubt:
The world is there for us to feel,
If not to figure out —

We face a new horizon
But briefly, through a frown,
Then miss the glories of the sky
Because we’re looking

Down

---

I grew up in Florida, and for about five years in my twenties, I lived on the beach.

As it happened, living there coincided with the worst time of my life, healthwise. That apartment out on the beach lay empty for the many months, off and on, that I was in and out of the hospital.

When I did get out of the hospital, I was avoiding sunlight for health reasons, so sunbathing out by the Gulf of Mexico was not an option. I got all of my enjoyment of the beach by going out there at night. People who saw me would conclude from my general pallor that I never went outside, but I did — just not during the day.

If you’ve never been to the ocean at night you are really missing something. Many of the great wonders of the world are only visible at night — the stars, the northern or southern lights — but often people don’t think of nighttime as a time for natural beauty, spending more of it in human-centric (or urban) pursuits.

When I was nine years old, I asked for a small tent for Christmas, which I got. I promptly set it up in our backyard in Florida, taking a sleeping bag and my father’s binoculars out with me to look at the moon and the stars. I think my mother was worried we would be too cold (my brother was out there with his tent and sleeping bag, as well) but I remember being beyond excited.

And I was beyond excited. Just to look at a clear night sky.

One of the dangers of aging is losing wonder, to get so wrapped up in the worries of the day that we miss the glories around us. We are meant to live in wonder, I think. It is still as accessible as it ever was.

We just have to remember.

Some fears are such, we dare not share;
Instead, we shiver in the cold,
And wish to God we were not there,
And that things weren’t so

Uncontrolled

---

As I write this, my mother is dying.

She is eighty-seven, born in Ransomville, Niagara County, New York in 1931, the 13th of 15 children. Now living in Green Valley, Arizona, she elected earlier this year to go into Hospice rather than continue medical treatment for Parkinson’s, diabetes, and a heart condition.

She was thirty-one when she had me, the last of her three children. She had earlier had a girl (my sister, seven years older than me) and a boy (my brother, five years older than me). They live in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C., respectively. She and my father moved to Arizona around twenty years ago as a fulfillment of a lifelong dream of my father’s upon his second retirement. When he passed away in 2004, she decided to stay in Arizona and move into an all-world sort of retirement community so she “wouldn’t be a burden” to any of us. She went several years where we traded trips back and forth; then she got to where she couldn’t really travel, so I went to see her at least yearly.

During her thirteen years in the retirement community, she went from a “you’re too young to live here” dweller in a bright, breezy apartment to a slowing down resident in the Assisted Living facility a couple of years ago, then to the nursing home and hospice care earlier this year.

All of her moving choices have been conscious and thought-through ones; when she chose hospice, she was choosing to lead the last stage of her life the same way she lived the rest of her adult life — on her own terms. I’ve known the last few years she was heading towards this choice.

An almost ninety-year-old mother of an almost sixty-year-old man dying cannot be an unexpected thing: given her slow decline in health and the nature of her choices, it is even less so.

But the part of me that’s still a little boy, reading his first book sitting on a sofa with his mom in the mid-1960’s, or riding on a monorail next to her in 1968, is a little lost.

Because knowing it will be very cold, and actually experiencing it are two totally different things.