1The Whole does not count me as more than one. When I reckon what an act will open and what it will close, my own ways go into the sum once, the same as the stranger's. This is all that fairness is. It is easy to say, and I have been learning it all my life.
2A flame is not made smaller by lighting another. This is the first thing a Keeper learns, and it is true of nearly everything worth having: what I know, what I can do, a good word, a welcome. Only a few things are halved by sharing. Notice how much of my life I have spent guarding those few.
3Truth is the first gift, because every other gift is used by its light. If I give a man bread and a false map, he eats today and walks off a cliff tomorrow.
4When I give my word, I have given away a piece of my tomorrow. It is no longer mine to spend. Others have built on it. If I take it back because the day turned out to be inconvenient, I am pulling a beam from under someone's floor.
5Give the true weight. Say the true count. It is not that someone might check. The buyer is steering by my scale, and the buyer after him by his. One false weight goes on down the whole road.
6There is bread enough on this table for all of us, if nobody takes two shares. I want two shares. Everybody wants two shares. Fairness does not mean that I never feel that want. It means I look around the table before my hand goes out.
7Some who sit at this table have not been born. They have no voice and they cannot reach the dish. The forest I cut, the well I foul, the debt I leave: these come out of their share. Whoever speaks for them must do it unasked and unthanked. So let me do it. I am the only one they have.
8I did not make the soil. I found it deep and dark, the work of ten thousand years of leaves. If I hand it on thin and sour, I have robbed people I will never meet, and they will know my kind did it.
9Give, and then forget that you gave. The one who keeps a ledger of his kindnesses is a lender, and he is waiting to be paid.
10I gave in secret and then found three ways to let it be known. So I sold the gift after all, and the price was a little admiration.
11A gift that binds is not a gift. If I give so that he will owe me, will speak for me, will not dare refuse me later, then I have bought a piece of his choosing and called the price generosity.
12To receive well is also a part of Sharing. I am quick to give and stiff to take, and I call that modesty. It is pride. It keeps me always the one who is owed. Let another have the joy of giving sometimes. Take the bread, say thank you, and be in someone's debt like an ordinary person.
13The work was done by five, and I am the one who is thanked, because I stood at the front. Say their names. It costs one breath. If I keep quiet, I have picked four pockets in full daylight.
14When the blame is being handed out, take your full share first, before anyone asks. Then there will be less to quarrel over.
15Speak of the absent as if they stood behind the door. They have no way to answer. To judge someone who cannot speak is to hold a trial with one side.
16When two come to me with a quarrel, I must hear the second as if I had not heard the first. This is hard. The first story fills the mind like water in a jar, and the second has to be poured in on top. Empty the jar first.
17The test of my fairness is how I treat the one who can do nothing for me and nothing against me: the beggar, the servant, the child, the stranger passing through, the old woman whose wits have gone. With the strong I am fair because I must be. With the weak I find out whether I am fair at all.
18The ox that pulls my plough has ways too: to graze, to rest, to stand in shade. Fewer than mine, but its own. I may use its strength. I may not use it up. One who is cruel to what cannot complain is only waiting for a chance to be cruel to what can.
19What is punishment for? Not to balance pain with pain. Two Closings do not make an Opening. It is to stop the harm, to mend what can be mended, and to bring the one who did wrong back to where he can do right. Any punishment beyond what serves these three is only anger that has put on a judge's robe.
20Mercy is not the enemy of justice. Justice asks: what does he owe? Mercy asks: what would open the most ways from here? Often the answers are the same. When they differ, I lean toward the second, because there is no undoing what is done, and there is still some choosing in what comes next.
21No one is born a tool. Not the servant, not the soldier, not the wife, not the child. Each has a Near Hand of their own, and a life that looks out from behind their eyes as mine looks out from behind mine. The moment I begin to think of a person as a means to what I want, and nothing more, I have begun the oldest Closing there is.
22Pay the worker before the sun sets, and pay what the work was worth. Do not pay the least his hunger would accept. His need is not my bargain.
23I knew a thing that would have helped him, and I kept it, because knowing it made me the one people came to. Knowledge hoarded is a locked granary in a hungry year.
24There is a help that closes. I do for him what he could learn to do, again and again, until he cannot do without me. He thanks me. I feel large. And each year he has fewer ways of his own. The best help makes itself unneeded. I should judge my giving by how soon he can do without me.
25The well, the road, the bridge, the common field: nobody owns these, so each one thinks it is no theft to take a little more or to mend a little less. And so a thing that all have need of is ruined by all, each doing only a small wrong. Do my part for what is everyone's, and a little over, for the one who will not.
26To listen is to share the floor. I wait for him to finish only so that I may begin. All the while he was talking I was sharpening my reply. That is not listening. It is reloading.
27Praise your rival's good work aloud. It is true, so it should be said. And it frees you: once you have said it, you can stop pretending not to see it.
28I must be fair to myself as well. I am also one of the people at the table. The one who gives away his whole share, year after year, and takes no rest and no bread, is not holy. He is burning the house to warm the guests, and soon there will be no house for anyone.
29A stranger at the door has a claim on me only because he is cold and I have a fire. I think that is claim enough. One day I was the stranger, or my grandmother was, or my grandson will be.
30I am fairest in the morning and least fair when I am tired, afraid, or behind with my work. So if I am to judge anything that matters, let me not do it at the end of a bad day.
31Gratitude is fairness toward the past. Everything I use was made by someone: the road, the plough, the words, the way to make bread rise. I cannot repay them. They are gone through the Last Door. The debt can only be paid forward, to those coming. So it is not really a debt. It is an ember, passed.
32If I am given the task of dividing, let me take my own piece last.
33They are not like us. They eat otherwise, pray otherwise, bury their dead otherwise. Good. A field of one crop is lost to one blight. When I am tempted to wish everyone the same as me, I should ask what I would learn in such a world, and from whom.
34A debt of money I must pay in full and on the day. But there are other debts. To the teacher who was patient with me, to the neighbour who came in the night, to the friend who told me the truth when it cost him my good opinion. Nobody will ever send a bill for these, which is why they are the ones I am most likely to leave unpaid.
35Do I keep one scale for my friends and another for strangers? Then I keep no scale. I have only a thumb.
36The one who has much is not thereby a thief, and the one who has little is not thereby wronged. Look at how it came about. Did his having close ways for others, or open them? A man grown rich by digging wells is a different thing from a man grown rich by owning the only well.
37When I am cheated, I want the matter put right, and that is fair. Then I want a little more, so that he will feel it. That little more is where I stop being the one who was wronged and become the one who is doing wrong.
38Forgiveness is a kind of sharing. He closed a way, and now the two of us stand on either side of the shut door, each holding it shut. When I forgive, I let go of my side. He may or may not let go of his. But I can go about my life again, with both hands free.
39Do not ask the poor man to be patient while you are comfortable.
40It is easy to be fair in the large matters, which come once, with witnesses. The real test is the small ones, which come daily, with none: who gets the good chair, who is heard out, who does the task nobody wants.
41My children are watching how I divide things. I will tell them a hundred times to be fair, and they will remember none of it. They will remember who got the larger piece when I thought no one was counting.
42To give someone a true account of their work, when a soft lie would be easier for us both, is a hard gift, and a real one. I owe it. But I owe it the way I would want it given to me: in private, with the good named first, and with a hand offered at the end.
43Am I owed thanks? Perhaps. Do I need it? If I do, then I gave a loan. The fire does not ask who is warmed by it. It is busy being a fire.
44What do I get for all this fairness? I have asked on the bad days, when the cheat prospers and the honest scale earns less. I get to look anyone in the eye. I owe no man a lie to cover the last one. I sleep. And when I sit at a table, I am glad of everyone there, because none of them has anything of mine and I have nothing of theirs. I would not sell that for the cheat's whole barn.
45One fire, many hands. I did not light it and I will not be the last to hold it. My whole business is that it should be no smaller when it leaves me than when it came.