I figure that, while I’ve darkened the lights on my old blog, I will not necessarily abandon all my words and since I’m on a long drive at the moment, I’ll occasionally post some (moderately edited) proverbial greatest hits. This one seemed appropriate given the world at large currently.
Enjoy!
From March 2012:
I’m going to do this sort of backwards. Let’s talk about karma.
I’ve had a few discussions recently about karma, about karmic shifts, and heard people make statements regarding karma. Well, this notion regarding reincarnation, prominent in Hinduism and Buddhism, is not a matter of today I kick my cat so tomorrow I stub my toe. Karma is not a universal quid pro quo. Even my explanation here will not fully explain the intricacies of karma but consider that karma is everything you do within a lifetime and the matter of the energy you’ve built up- banked perhaps- and it denotes where you come back. Coming back as a human is a good thing, because this means you have another shot at transcending this plane. Not coming back is even better. This means you’ve hopefully moved into one of the heavenly planes. Or you could come back as an animal, a plant, or even as a “hungry ghost”. These shades are on the very low end of karmic recycling. My sweet Vietnamese Buddhist monk teacher would cringe at the way karma is thrown around in Western society, as though it is a quick trade off. That’s like reducing baptism to being cleansed of all sins everytime you shower. Karma is instead something determined after a lifetime of choices, based on your intentions, based on your soul after learning and growing and having many opportunities to change, improve, and embrace reality as it is.
With that said, many of us, particularly those of us in privileged places in society and who live first world lives, have this notion that after things have royally sucked for a time, there’s got to be a pendulum shift the other way. Well, I’ve been trying to embrace this idea as I WORK to enact positive change in my life after hitting some very rocky depths of despair. The fact is, though, that there is no pendulum. What happens to each of us is so random. You can have your house burn down, your entire family die, and still get cancer the next day: no matter what you believe, no matter what you’ve done. That’s a fact. How you face it is, of course, your choice. You can be positive or despair. Though the choice to despair is not accurate when faced with depression and other mental illnesses. In those cases, we can only hope to be strong enough to ask for help as we drown.
But that’s the thing. This is not “the best of all possible worlds.” Sorry, I’m back to Candide once more. No amount of prayer will prevent your house burning down, a car accident, or cancer. No matter how good a person you are, no matter how much you attempt to live a good and harm free life, these things will happen. Just because you survive the cancer doesn’t mean your mother won’t drop dead the next day or your husband won’t leave you. This world is uncaring about what we’ve already endured and how much we can handle. It is not cruel, it is indifferent, and that is often hard to process mentally. If you don’t believe me, think about the poor children in Syria or Ethiopia or any other country rampant with war and poverty. The poor girl who may survive her village’s outbreak of cholera that kills her whole family, who finds work to support herself but still ends up raped, ending up with HIV/AIDS, though she never spoke a harsh word against anyone and offered all she had to help those in need. Or the adults in Palestine and Israel who survive 20 or so near misses from missile attacks but suddenly get hit and die. Did any of these people deserve this? Did any of them deserve to be born in a country mired in war and poverty (well, that’s up to karma to decide, if you believe in it)? Didn’t these people survive enough? Where was their upswing on the pendulum?
So, am I working my hardest to enact positive change in my small, insignificant first world universe? Yes. Because I believe that if you want something, you work for it and many times, you will be successful simply by being true to your projected course. I believe in perseverence and I am tenacious to a fault. Until I see that a cause is an utter loss, I will maintain my goals… sometimes even after I see the lost cause, I have a hard time giving up. But all of this that makes me who I am and brought me to where I am now… and though it is a painful and lonely place, it is still a very good place. I live in this country (flawed as it is), I live in this time, I am strong, regaining my health and sanity, capable, and I tend to be rather clever (and there’s nothing The Doctor loves more than cleverness). So, yes, I am “lucky,” if you believe in such a thing. I don’t harbor a lot of superstitions, I am not tied to antiquated ideas, I have a mind capable of sorting through possibility, probability, and empiricism, to often (but not always) make reasonable choices.
So, is the idea of “just desserts” or some pendulum randomly swinging good and bad into our lives nice? Yes, comforting. I don’t rely on ephemera for my peace of mind though. I don’t believe in a paternalistic white god doling out reward and punishment from on high. I believe that we must work for what we want and regardless of that, the world will shift and spin and fall out from underneath us at any moment. But that’s part of the beauty. I am insignificant, I am small… but I still get to live this life for as long as I am here. I get to smile and dance and eat and experience… and when it comes time, I will get to teach a child of my own to enjoy each of these things and to be amazed by what is surrounding us. The universe is no less stupendous for being random and indifferent. It is more so.
So, I hope. I hope for a pendulum to swing for me but that’s because I am doing the WORK for it.