Just Keep Turning Up
In a world that worships justice and punishes tenderness, this reflection dares to show up anyway. It’s a meditation on persistence — not as triumph, but as soulful survival. Through disappointment and quiet defiance, the post traces how love endures where justice corrodes, and how resilience becomes a kind of sacred rebellion.
I find the word justice to be contemptible. Perhaps this ramble can explain it…
Suppose you are in love. Perhaps you know them, or perhaps you just know they are out there somewhere. Perhaps you keep turning up. Wherever. But they never show. But you keep turning up. You keep wandering about, fishing for clues, going with your gut. Turning up.
Well that’s life. That is what life is like for all of us. It’s the business of just turning up again.
But then suppose one day you wake up and have an epiphany regarding how unfair this all is. How unjust. And so you stop turning up.
Well that’s justice. It marks the death of a soul and the birth of a victim. If we look back hard enough we can find the places where that die was cast, the first betrayal, the first betrayed. Those clarity-ridden moments when standards got the ok to slip.
And so you change. You think you are owed stuff. You think you’ve had a bad deal. You got parties to blame.
And once you acquire a taste for justice, you become something else again, something picky, isolating, patronizing and segregating. Something harsh but fair.
My advice:blame no one, measure no one, just keep turning up.
(Originally posted 23 Dec 2008. Altered at whim.)
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and full-time tinkerer of tags. He once wrote a poem about recursion that never ended, and a JavaScript confession that crashed three browsers. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and nostalgic detours. He believes in the transformative power of satire, the elegance of well-placed meta tags, and the occasional necessity of poetic nonsense.
This one’s a philosophical gut-punch — a meditation on love, persistence, and the corrosive allure of justice-as-resentment. It reframes justice not as virtue but as a seductive trap, a turning point where hope curdles into victimhood. The tone is intimate, reflective, and quietly radical, with “just keep turning up” as both mantra and rebellion.