I think about that afternoon outside the sari-sari store differently now. I can still picture the dusty road, the oppressive Cebu heat, the woman waiting behind the counter and the stranger who happened to find money while I was searching for mine. At the time, the situation seemed to contain an obvious imbalance. He was fortunate, I was unfortunate, and because I had no better explanation, I briefly imagined that fortune itself had made an accounting error.

Perhaps the greater mistake was mine. I had treated two unrelated circumstances as though they belonged to the same moral transaction. His good luck seemed somehow connected to my disappointment, as though the world had accidentally transferred something meant for me into somebody else’s hands. Worse, I had begun evaluating what a complete stranger deserved without knowing anything about his life.

I wonder how often we do the same thing on a much larger scale. We see someone succeed and decide they must have worked harder than everyone else. We see another person struggling and quietly wonder whether their own choices brought them there. Prosperity can look like evidence of superior judgement, while hardship is treated almost like an accusation that requires explanation.

It is a convenient way to understand the world, particularly when we happen to be doing well. If everybody receives exactly what they deserve, then our good fortune becomes proof of our virtue and somebody else’s difficulties become evidence of their inadequacy. We no longer have to consider the less comfortable influences of circumstance, opportunity, inequality, timing or plain chance.

Fairness, however, seems to require something more demanding than explanations designed to make us comfortable. It asks us to recognise merit without worshipping success, acknowledge responsibility without automatically blaming people for their suffering, and remember that our own circumstances are not a universal measure of what everybody else ought to receive.

I still believe effort matters. Choices have consequences, integrity deserves respect and people should be accountable for the harm they cause. Without those principles, fairness becomes little more than an attractive word we use whenever an outcome displeases us. But I am far less convinced that life itself distributes rewards according to the same principles.

Good people encounter difficulties they did nothing to invite. Careless decisions occasionally produce surprisingly favourable outcomes. Some people work extraordinarily hard for opportunities that others seem to receive almost effortlessly. Sometimes there is a lesson hidden inside disappointment, but sometimes an event is simply an unfortunate meeting of circumstance, timing and chance.

Accepting that does not have to make us cynical. I think it can make us more careful with our judgements. When someone succeeds, we can celebrate them without pretending we understand every advantage that helped shape the outcome. When somebody struggles, we can offer compassion without first demanding evidence that they have earned it. When our own circumstances become difficult, perhaps we can also resist treating every setback as proof that we have somehow failed morally.

There is an important difference between accepting that life is not always fair and deciding that fairness is therefore pointless. In fact, I suspect the opposite is true. If justice were automatically guaranteed by circumstance, human beings would have very little responsibility for creating it. We could simply stand back and wait for every deserving person to be rewarded and every harmful person to receive an appropriately timed consequence.

But that is clearly not how the world behaves. Outcomes are uneven, unpredictable and often imperfect, which means fairness becomes something we have to practise deliberately. It matters in classrooms and workplaces, within families and friendships, and in those smaller encounters where we decide whether another person’s circumstances deserve our understanding or our judgement.

I no longer think the world owes me a favourable outcome simply because I have tried to behave well. At the same time, disappointment does not excuse me from behaving fairly towards other people. Perhaps that is a steadier foundation for living: to do what is right without assuming the universe has promised to reimburse us, and to meet good fortune with gratitude rather than superiority.

As for the ten-peso coin, I eventually found it inside the same pocket I had searched several times. Apparently, the investigation had suffered from a serious shortage of competence and a very generous supply of confidence. I remember the ridiculous relief when my fingers finally touched the familiar edge of the coin, and for one dramatic second I wanted to believe that fortune had corrected itself and the mysterious department responsible for distributing life’s blessings had finally reviewed my complaint.

Then I laughed because the coin had been there the entire time. The stranger had not taken anything from me, nobody had cheated me, and the universe had not rearranged its moral principles to return ten pesos to a girl who had simply failed to search her pocket properly. I had invented an injustice because I did not like the feeling of being unlucky.

That is probably why I still remember the story. Sometimes we really are treated unfairly. Sometimes people receive advantages they did not earn, while others are denied opportunities they genuinely deserved. Those situations deserve attention, criticism and, where possible, action. But sometimes we are merely disappointed because events did not favour us, and if we cannot distinguish between disappointment and injustice, we risk turning personal frustration into a judgement about somebody else’s worth.

I imagine that stranger reached home without giving our brief encounter another thought. Perhaps he spent the money immediately, saved it for later or managed to lose it again before sunset. I will never know, and strangely, I no longer feel entitled to know. The only part of that little story that genuinely belonged to me was what I chose to make of it.

I slipped the recovered coin back into my pocket, this time paying considerably more attention to where I placed it, and walked home beneath the Cebu sun. The road was still dusty and the afternoon remained unbearably hot. Somewhere, another person was probably enjoying an unexpected stroke of luck while somebody else was having a thoroughly disappointing day, and none of us knew enough about one another to decide who deserved which.

Perhaps that was the lesson waiting for me outside the sari-sari store. It was not that life would eventually divide everything into perfect portions or make sure everybody received their rightful share. It was that I had been far too eager to decide what another person ought to receive while knowing almost nothing about the life that had brought them to that afternoon.

After all, it had taken me nearly half an hour to understand the contents of my own pocket. I was hardly qualified to claim that I understood the contents of somebody else’s life.

Still learning before I judge,

Anj 🙂