Winds of change

Heres a little gem about life I learnt while long distance running.

If you don't run then you will just have to use your imagination- There is this moment when you are in the zone. You are clocking along at a great pace. You are comfortable, pushing yourself but not too hard. Your body feels amazing and your mind is free to absorb the surroundings. You wonder why everyone doesnt get up at 5am and run. The sun is shining and all is good and right with the world. Cue choir... hallelujah.

You pass runners going the other way and wonder why they look like they are having such a bad time. Their heads are bowed in concentration and they seem to be fighting for every step. Geez how do they make it look so hard? Maybe they arent as fit as you? You do train pretty hard. Thats probably it, your superior skills are paying off as you sail through life. 

Haha... Darling you have a tail wind. 

The amazing thing is you cant even feel it. Those other runners are battling a head wind that is sweeping you majestically in the other direction. They ARE fighting for every step. Some of them will be thinking of it as resistance training and others will be wondering why they got out of bed early for this shit. 

This, my friend, is what privilege feels like. Wind at your back and sun in your face. 

Sure you got up at 5am and did the work. Yay you. But when you look around and think it's a level playing field and you're winning because you are a better player then I have news for you. 

The beautiful thing about running is you generally have to turn around and run home thus experiencing the head wind as a reality check against your personal marvellousness. In life you can sail along with privillage and never have a moment of insight that allows you to feel compassion for those not blessed to have wind beneath their wings. 

Failing to see bias doesn't negate its existence- that's what people mean when they say "check your privilege". If you react in anger or denial then you might have some work to do there.

Maybe you are suffering from the Just World Fallacy whereby you think that pretty much all good efforts will be rewarded and conversely bad deeds will be punished therefore ultimately people get what they deserve? But wait Cyberia, surely that is how it works, otherwise the world would be a random violent place right where bad things happen to good people and it would be hard to remain positive and optimistic in the face of this? For some people the world is a random violent place where their success is less correlated to their efforts than the colour of their skin, their gender, their age or a myriad of other attributes that we pretend not to judge. It is hard for them to remain positive and optimistic. Check your privilege. 

We are also prone to a spot of correspondence bias aka fundamental attribution error whereby when we do something (run the red light) because we had a good reason but 'they' do it because they're such a (insert curse, rude hand gesture and cue road rage) 

Check if you've done this one lately because it feeds our feeling of superiority. Don't expect people that pack up their belongings and walk a 1000 miles to save their kids/ love of their life/ their own skin, etc from war, violence and persecution to wait patiently in a fictitious queue. You wouldn't and you know this for a fact. They want a better life? No shit Einstein. 

You have to be careful about creating a world in which any particular group has nothing left to lose. They get very low down in the hierarchy of needs and your cushy world starts to look bourgeois... Viva the revolution. 

Woo,  I totally got all ranty-pants... Back into the yoga pants.

All I'm really asking you to do is to turn around for a moment and see if that isn't a tail wind at your back and if there is then maybe you could create a slipstream for someone else, after all, we are all in this together.