This Thing Called Karma

“What others do to you is their karma, how you respond to it, is yours”

For the past few years, I often repeated this mantra – to myself,
to my children, in my blogs, when I spoke in class or at conferences…  It had become a standard mantra.

Like all philosophical mantras, this one with all its dogmatic relevance challenged me – every single time. At the end of it, I had no choice but to surrender to it and move on.

But…. let me be the first to say that I moved on, probably looking calm on the outside but on the inside, I moved on kicking and scratching with the frustration of obvious injustice of it all.

Life wasn’t fair and I was furious at being dealt with such an unfair and biased hand. It was clear to anyone who chose to see the unfairness, yet, all I could do was sit back and breathe.

Philosophy can only do so much when it comes to self management. All those golden myths and quotes of ‘higher consciousness’ guiding us how to respond to life’s quandaries meant nothing if I couldn’t recall them when I needed to.

But here’s where I surprised myself.

I remembered them – not always immediately – sometimes, the essence of those quotes and higher truths slowly peeked out from under the blanket of my inner turmoil, waiting shyly until I saw them and embraced them. I didn’t always do that – I didn’t always embrace them.

The perspective of injustice is not easy to drop – especially when shy hope peeks out at you with a Monopoly-influenced Chance or Community card that says, “Hang in there!”.

I was tired of hanging in there while this army of spite of casting weapon after weapon at me, at my children – hoping to break me down, hoping to take me down, hoping to annihilate me and this sense of hope that I carried.

Truly, holding on to any goodness or any light in the middle of a pitch black cloud of terror is not easy. It reeks of despair and desperate urgency and it echoes of the spiteful laughter that is intended to draw you down.

Or is it really?

Because I found that even after allowing myself my moments of despair and that self-invited, gate crashing into my own perfectly organised pity party, I found that that shy hope had accompanied me, uninvited, too.

And I was able to pause – no, I only paused, I didn’t come to this big ta-daaa moment where all of a sudden I could see the meaning of life or anything, but there was an odd sense of clarity – like I could somehow navigate through this crap even if it only meant one day at a time, one step at a time.

I still couldn’t understand how anyone could justify their silence over the negligence and lack of providence for their their own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. There was no excuse. But there was nothing, there is nothing I can do to light up the heart and soul of people who have closed themselves to anything but vengeance, greed, anger and hatred – almost all of which has no basis except that they are asked to be that way as a token of loyalty. People who have lost touch with any sense of humanity and integrity to do the right thing.

Because..? Sigh! I better not comment…

So I continued my love-hate relationship with this whole concept of Karma and wondered if reincarnation were my only way out to have this insanity play out of my existence…. I wondered if this were my destiny, my fate…. until…

There was a sudden turn of events… and every ounce of my being – my head, my body, my voice, my heart started screaming, “Karma!! What you give is what you get!!” I felt redeemed and at the same time I felt guilty for feeling redeemed. I felt there was a God!! And then I remembered that I didn’t believe in a vindictive God! But we all pay for our transgressions, don’t we? Heaven and Hell is right here – right now… and we can’t really run away from doing shit to others, playing with their lives, their emotions and their feelings… right?

This meme came up on one of my facebook pages… a post from 2015

Then why did this expression of karma and karmic response (I can’t think of anything else at this point) – why did it unsettle me so? Was it that I didn’t believe that it would come around to justify my experiences?

Then I remembered my mantra. And I hated it for coming up when really, all I wanted to do was remain with my self-righteous anger, the anger that I so deserved to feel and experience. The anger of betrayal, of family turning so vile that they turned their back on me, the anger of loving a man who didn’t deserve it and the anger towards a father who was willing to sacrifice his children’s lives to perpetuate his own sense of self and egoistic narcissism.

I had every reason to remain angry and then feel angry towards the mantra too for coming up and taking me away from my moment of self-righteousness and making me pause.

Pause…. to think, to feel, to introspect, reflect and respond…

Damn! This philosophy of life that I had bought into – these ideals of living with my head held high – they’re taking away my moment of kick-back tantrum-throwing, and rage at the injustice and all that juicy drama that I can engage in…. even if it is in the privacy of my own bedroom.

psst…. It was that mantra again…

Ok… I was going to do what I believed in… I was going to follow that mantra…. and allow karma to do it’s bit, while I did what I felt right and honorable to do.

I wondered if I was doing this to be on the good side of karma – or however the karmic loophole was. I wondered if  in my ‘don’t react, don’t retaliate, don’t stoop down to their level, just hold the highest intention, do your best and move ahead‘ formula was my way of appeasing the Law of Karma or something. I wondered if that instinctive desire deep-down to scream and tear everything that was unjust apart was the real me and in my choosing to be calm, I was just toeing the ‘expected’ response to be in Karma’s good books.

I was torn by playing the devil’s advocate for myself.

So, I decided that it wasn’t worth it to fall in my own eyes – karma or no karma. It wasn’t worth succumbing to hatred and discounting the values that my parents, grandmother, uncles and aunts had raised me with. It wasn’t worth shaming the effort I had put into my own evolution. And above all, it wasn’t worth nullifying whatever I was going to hold as an example and model for my children to emulate.

Karma was a bitch, indeed – but she was watching me and even if it meant taking the high road in the face of bone-crushing reason to be nasty, I was going to take it.

Let me know what you think in the comments section below..