kar•ma – n.
- Hinduism & Buddhism. The total effect of a person’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person’s existence, regarded as determining the person’s destiny.
- Fate; destiny.
- Informal. A distinctive aura, atmosphere, or feeling: There’s bad karma around the house today.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and a recent post spurred the thought again. Every now and then the word Karma will pop up in conversation. Good Karma, bad Karma, people getting what they “deserve”. In some cases this means the person should have piles of money laid at their feet or have a piano fall on their head. For a long time I liked the idea of Karma. It made the world balanced, like some great cosmic scale. Often I would imagine this very large woman, large in the “I am larger then the universe” large, shifting grains of sand from one dish to another. She would pause, waiting to see which way the scale would tip. Once it tipped she would smile this knowing, slightly creepy smile because she knew what was going to happen.
But I digress.
Back to Karma.
I mentioned that I liked the idea of Karma because it made it so that things were out of my hands. I could trust in the universe to take care of those that hurt me and grant boons to those that had aided me. But then I really started thinking about Karma, and how people I know use it. I would say 85% of the time when people use this word it is because they want revenge. They want someone who has hurt them, screwed them over in some small or large way to hurt because they are hurting. I’ve done it. When someone has messed with me at work or in my personal life I’ll say something to the effect that they are just accumulating Bad Karma and that it will get them in time. Rarely have I ever thought, “Gee that person has done so many nice things, Good Karma should be coming their way.” Nope, I almost always focus on the bad Karma and how it can hurt someone that has hurt me.
I could easily talk about the thousands who have died senseless deaths, the children and other innocents. Why did they deserve to die, where was Karma in those circumstances? But that scope is a bit too large for me to tackle before 11:00 in the morning. Instead lets use a friend of mine as an example. Her mother died when she was a teenager, her father died in her early 20s. Her father’s girlfriend tried to screw her out of her inheritance and during this time her then husband and her split up. They went through a divorce that lasted years where he tried to take her inheritance. Now this girl is one of the kindest, sweetest, wonderful women I know. There is no way that she could have accumulated that much “Bad Karma” to deserve all of that. Yes good things are happening to her now but not because of Karma, because she WORKED HER ASS OF FOR IT!
Karma I think is just a lazy way of saying that you are not going to take responsibility for your life, or that you don’t have the balls to say you want revenge on someone. You throw the word out there and hope the “universe” takes care of it. It is bullshit. If a someone is a bad person, they lie, cheat and stealsthen it is fair to say that one day they are going to get hurt for it. Either they’ll lose a job or someone they care about. Or, in an extreme case, someone will hurt them physically for their actions. Their actions are what cause them this pain, not Karma storing up grains of sand.
The same goes for Good Karma, if you want something good to happen, then work for it. I went through a very dark time in my life where I was very unhappy, lonely and depressed. It was so easy then to say that the world had it out for me, but each of those emotions was a direct reflection of choices I had made. I was the one that made the conscious choice to change. It was not luck or good Karma that got me a job I love. It was the fact that I worked my ass off and studied very hard to learn the skills that allows me to excel in this job. It is not good Karma that makes my relationship with Gary so wonderful. It’s the fact that we work very hard on our relationship in order to communicate and be supportive of one another.
Take responsibility for your actions and your own destiny. If you want revenge then say you want revenge, don’t mask it. Help someone make their life better by doing something good and generous. Maybe one day that person will do the same for someone else. That is not Karma. That is the human spirit. It’s not about how many grains of sand you have on your scale; it’s about how you live your life. You make your own fate by the choices you make, so try to make good ones.
