Dear Michael –
I am answering directly as opposed to blogging as I just can’t get into yet another dimension of cyber communication. Email and websites are more than enough things to have to check. The postings from professional, political, and personal boards fill up my box daily making it hard enough to give appropriate time and consideration.
That being said, I always like to respond to your thoughts and questions.
Had you not made your own list of things for which you are grateful (and responding on Thanksgiving makes this richer), I would have pointed some out to you as examples of your good karma. I think many people would look at your life and see the blessings and perceive the challenges as merely small bumps along the way.
Bumps and bruises never feel the same to anyone else. "I feel your pain" can only, be at best, a metaphor or an expression of empathy and concern. Perhaps in your hands on healing work, you actually did fell others pain, but that is rare.
We automatically yell out something when we stub our toe. Why shouldn’t we rail against the "karmic" bumps. But toe-stubbing doesn’t cripple us.
My brother, who is wonderfully successful in most areas of his life has a fascinating way of dealing with "problems". He says, "Problems — by definition — have solutions. So you try things. If you discover after some reasonable effort that there is no solution, it’s not a problem. It’s a fact of life. Move on to the next thing." He really is able to live out through this. It explains a lot about his success and why I’m the brother who takes an antidepressant.
On the other hand, I was talking to someone just the other day and telling him that periodically — most often during a moment at work — I look around and truly experience myself in my life as "wonderful." In the truest sense of the word, I am struck full of wonder and feel fully how lucky I am to be me in this moment. My karma feels great!
I have often asked myself if it is, in fact, some karmic curse that I have not achieved much of what I would have hoped to accomplish personally and professionally and still make the effort to achieve. There are days when I feel so discouraged that it "feels" like the effort is simply useful since "I’m never going to get what I want anyhow."
In my saner moments, I look at that two extremes of my experience — that I am blessed with a wonderful life — and that I am cursed to never really get what I truly desire. Then it is somewhat clearer that the glass is neither half-empty nor half-full. That in order to be one, it must simultaneously be the other and it is in experiencing the totality that I can embrace the richness of my life.
We all know the happy idiots who blithely toss off catastrophe because they are just too stupid to see how awful it is. Or the kvetches who take pleasure in one-upping with their problems. (I had a friend who complained to me about something unpleasant at work when I called to tell him of my other brother’s death. To which I said, "You win. You have the absolute worst life on the planet. No one can ever come close to the sheer misery you experience every day. I’m sorry.")
A long winded response to finding some agreement with your notion that how we respond is our own experience of karma.
But I think there’s more. I think people who do really awful things create a bad karma for themselves. It may not manifest in any visible way. The liars, cheats and thieves often gain much visible success and even seem quite happy with it. (Wouldn’t we love to think that underneath it they are suffering with guilt knowing of their misdeeds?) But I do think that in order to have that, the "bad karma" is that it closes them to compassion and empathy — the very things which make us human. They lose a moral compass that makes for a civilized world. And their bad karma is often their legacy.
And, I think there is mystery. That we don’t know that this "challenge" will teach us the valuable lesson if we persevere through it. It may be a shitty hand and there is nothing more to it than the luck of this draw.
Much of our discomfort comes from not having the answers — not to the challenges and not to the big questions. That’s why the happy idiot remains cheerful. He doesn’t even ask the questions. But for most of us, suffering is real, and we want to believe there is meaning in it. In our most despairing moments, we feel we suffer in a meaningless void.
At the end of Chekhov’s play, The Three Sisters, the characters are trying to make some sense of suffering and the oldest has come to believe that we can never really answer that biggest of questions. "If only we knew. If only we knew. If only we knew."
So my even longer winded response is: I don’t know. But I do believe that in asking the questions, in the search itself, and in sharing with others, we find at least some meaning, some times. And that is very good karma indeed.
Ever fondly,
Lester
____________________
MN:
You’ve hit on so many great points, Lester, I don’t know where to start. In fact, you may be the only one of the 50+ responses I’ve received to actually have answered the question I posed in the newsletter asking what you do to create Good Karma (ie. creating a "list." {Stay tuned for an upcoming newsletter regarding this}).
And I love your protrayal of your brother’s approach to life:
"Problems — by definition — have solutions. So you try things. If you discover after some reasonable effort that there is no solution, it’s not a problem. It’s a fact of life. Move on to the next thing."
Dang! Where can I read his blog?