Hi Tracy!
Delighted to hear from you!
Your question is one that so many of us wrestle with on a daily basis!
There is always an answer - it's only a matter of finding the pathway to that answer - within our own smart selves! (without answers we risk being victims?! - I'm SO NOT into playing "let's blame the victim" - our selves - or anyone else!)
Do we believe there are ALWAYS very good reasons for our experience? (including pain, unfairness and all the rest of it.... along with joy, justice and all the rest of that...)
To some degree, to look for the answer to that question may be to look clearly into the mirroring pond of our experienced reality and realize that life is a perfect reflection of our understanding. It can often be difficult to see our own reasons between self-and-Self - let alone to see others reasons, but I believe there ARE perfectly sound, smart, sensible reasons for absolutely everything we experience!
In itself, this recognition of our own good sense, can be helpful, for then we can decide (or not) to begin to question self-to-Self, just what our own individual reasons might be for anything: as in, "what is this situation X really about?" or "who is really responsible for what here? - am I accepting false responsibility or false guilt - or am I not accepting the responsibility that is truthfully my own for my own thinking, feeling and acting?". Maybe this question can act as a trigger for us to ask "what understanding of my self, my intentions, reasons, beliefs - what is it that my Self is wanting to help me see about my own power and how I view and use my power of mind and choice, with an aim to real self-empowerment"?! One of my personal daily questions is -- "Am I making an honest effort to understand X?"
In the poem "Unison of Circles" (click on the Home page side-bar "Mystical Verses, and then the poems title from that list) or click
http://www.selftoself.com/poetry/unison_circles.htm there is a line that goes "...you ask your heart - then close your mind, you want to seek - but not to find..." All of us do just that when we aren't ready to discover what the answers really are just yet - for our own very good reasons!
I really don't believe that this question about why life's experiences can be so variably unfair or difficult, is about those ideas that would tell us it's somehow our own fault if life gets haywire and hard & woeful - None of us deliberately "doesn't understand!!!" - or deliberately goes out and "creates" pain or suffering - that's just too shallow and masochistic a belief about human nature for me!
In the same way, for the same basic reasons, I also don't believe that we "draw" problems or problem people or situations to us. We "may not recognize" that we've left some doors open - and then we may not understand how to put out what managed to come in through those doors - or even how to close those doors, exactly -- yet! You know? It does make a certain kind of sense (at least to me) to look at our personal life challenges as a learning process - the process of learning about our private power of mind's functioning that interweaves through ALL of our experiences. We never stop experiencing and we are never without our mind's involvement.
To question why life challenges some more than others is a very good point. In a way that is to ask why "you" are you, and "I" am me - and maybe part of the answer is to acknowledge that we are each unique individuals with personal self-to-Self purposes and meanings for our lives. However I do believe that each of us can discover - and challenge the ways we learn to cope, compensate, manage and in every way interpret our own specific facts-of-life toward our own best use/advantage and aims. That we are uniquely individual is not exactly the issue; nor is questioning why we have such variations in life-challenges. How we learn to put together our own specifics/facts to arrive at our personal experiences of this life, is perhaps a more meaningful question.
To register the "fact" that Life is often entirely "unfair", is not necessarily to accept such unfairness as any sort of given truth about the nature of Life. There is a difference between acknowledging the current existence of experienceable facts and mistaking the truth of their appearance as if it is somehow a truth or a proof that it's some pre-ordained absolute ABOUT life, that can be applied equally to all of us. (Some people don't significantly experience life as unfair - from their personal point of view!) To discover the difference here is to realize that we - as the humans in humanity - are the ones who set up the "rules" to the game - even though it so often seems we don't. Still, human choice is the power that designs the systems by which this world generally operates - or the sides of the box in which most of generally experience our lives. Even in the case of illness, deformity, "accident" - the human hand has had some stroke or measure - some impact on the long links of human history and development.
To be honest, this was one of my own questions that set me on the path of Speaker Material. My experience was/is that I needed to grow myself into my own understanding. I had to start where I was and work my way through the various layers of concept that are written into the heart of this question. This is not just some simple question and we are not just some simple-minded selfs - so it's like anything else we set about learning - we can't reasonably expect to understand advanced mathematics if we don't yet know how to add and subtract! But there is nothing to stop us from doing the learning!
Hope you will never quit asking that question until you can find your own path to answering it from the inside-out of your own deepest understandings. Naturally I'm biased, and believe that the concept building process this site offers, that lets any of us expand our thinking so we can trace the why's of Life - for ourselves, is worth the effort it takes to read this work.
Maybe you can/would like to narrow the focus of the ideas within this question - sometimes, if we can find specific examples, it helps us answer those broad questions. In a certain way, this goes toward the idea that "the lesson is in the learning", for in struggling to answer the specific/personal side of something, we automatically discover we can see the broader view suddenly - or the other way around!
Thanks so much for joining in this dance Tracy ! A great cha cha chat!
See you later,
Spinfo
P.S.
I think you are psychic - honestly - because the next piece of material to be posted (under the side-bar "Conversations"), speaks to some issues very closely related to this very question! Stay tuned!!