pout all you want.
Life isn’t fair.
This was something that my parents instilled in me as a young child. Let me just preface this post by saying that I had a beyond-amazing childhood. We didn’t suffer any hardships (none that I was aware of, at least), and I grew up in a loving home where my parents were and still are together. Maybe it was because I grew up without any real tragedy or struggle that my parents felt the need to impress this upon me, although as a child that meant not giving me money for the ice-cream man.
As an adult, I’ve realized that this statement is truer than I could have ever imagined it to be. Plain and simple, life isn’t fair. It’s not only that it isn’t fair, but there’s a fair amount of injustice that occurs and pretty much jack that we can do about it. In my world, it mostly manifests itself as a rival or unqualified individual getting something they don’t deserve while the person who does (mainly, me) is passed over. I promise this isn’t going to digress into a mini-tantrum.
The Rolling Stones so poignantly said, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.” But what they didn’t tell us was how to get over not getting what you want and how to not punch the person that got it. If you’re over the age of ten, you’ve experienced some kind of disappointment in life. You didn’t make the varsity team. You didn’t get the guy (or girl) you were pining after. You didn’t get the promotion. So what do you do next?
“But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”
Unless some grave injustice was done, sadly, the best thing to do is not react at all. Sure, from experience I know you’d love to go scream at the person that got what you wanted or who gave what you wanted to someone else and it would feel great-awesome-amazing in the moment – maybe even for the rest of the day, or for a few weeks or months, even. But at some point, the person you went off on in your need for vindication and justice might once again find themselves in the position to give you or help you get what you want, and wouldn’t you feel even worse if they passed you over yet again because of something that you did and could’ve prevented? Self-serving scenarios aside, it’s also necessary to redirect that outrage, justified or not, and use it for a better pursuit; you might want to take a long, hard, and sometimes not-so-pleasant look at yourself and see if you’ve contributed to not getting whatever it is you wanted so desperately.
Whether you’re a believer in The Law of Attraction or just in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, take comfort in the fact that everything truly happens for a reason. You know the old saying, “When one door closes, a window opens.” Not getting what you want could really be life’s way of telling you that it wasn’t right for you in the first place and that there’s something else waiting.
Or that you’re a spoiled brat and you didn’t deserve it in the first place. Here’s hoping it’s the former.
