Tag: karma

Letting Go

It is among the most common things a healing person hears as they work to move on in life.

“Just let it go.”

That phrase used to infuriate me.

It smacked of absolving the perpetrators of their misdeeds. It meant giving up control over how I believed the story should end.

The evildoers should collapse on their knees in front of me and beg for my forgiveness. They should admit all the wrongs they committed. They should express their repentance for the hurt they caused me.

A person could wait around for a really, really long time for that to happen.

There is something comforting in the belief that evildoers may eventually be “hoist on their own petard.” That maybe karma will have its way with them. The hope that one day they would suffer as much as they made us suffer.

All of that is profound wishful thinking that merely gives us an illusion of control.

In the end, there is nothing we can do to shape or alter another’s behavior. Not really. Sure, we can dole out favors and dispense punishments to control those who depend on us.

But serious harm rarely takes place in that type of situation. Keeping children or employees in line is fairly straightforward. One cannot confuse the mindless actions of dependents with the evil intent of those who actually mean us harm.

Healing from harm eventually all comes back to us. We can whine and complain and “woe is me” as long as we like. It will change nothing. It will only keep the pain fresh and alive in us. It will only frustrate and diminish us.

To heal and grow, we must move on. A friend swindled you out of money or position? Unfriend him or her and move on. Your fiance cheated on you? It is up to you to explore your heart and mind to determine if that act can be forgiven or ends the relationship. Someone treats you badly, maybe even assaults you? Get as far away from that person as is humanly possible.

I watch lawyer’s ads on television and they repel me. One lawyer consistently gets high dollar awards for their clients who have been wronged or injured in some kind of accident. The satisfied customers express undying gratitude to the lawyer. They are grateful for their awards as if the lawyer was their savior and the dollar outcome was their due.

It is not their due. It is a game. It is luck of the draw. It is the strength of the fact pattern and narrative. Life owes us nothing.

It is only when that penny drops can we begin to take concrete steps to define what we want and what we can and cannot control. We can control our reactions. We can control our actions. We can decide how to move forward and move on in life.

This is the importance of taking personal responsibility. We are the only ones who can decide that degree to which external events affect us and shape us. Blaming others – the perpetrator, our parents, the system, god, “bad luck” – is a common reaction and revenge tactic when we have been badly hurt.

The problem is that it is ultimately unsatisfying and out of our control.

By taking full and absolute personal responsibility for the impact of our injuries, only then can we devise strong coping strategies and learn to call on the inner strength we all possess in our core.

An injured wild animal will slink off into the woods and find a safe place to hunker down and heal. I have had to do that a few times in my life When the threat was large and my options limited, absenting myself was often the only healthy solution.

None of this is to say that healthy solutions are easy or don’t generate their own type of pain. Turning your back on unhealed family members, for example, is not without its own hard feelings and complications.

But like the fox who chews off its’ own foot to escape the trap, it is sometimes the difficult choices is the only way out. The fox evaluates its options and makes its decision based on what it can or cannot do. The fox who chooses to accept the trap usually pay with their lives. Many people do the same thing.

So I am in a phase of letting go of some things and feelings I should have let go of years ago. So what? Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

If we believe that each day is a new beginning (and in my world, it is), we can choose to start anew. We can turn our backs on the past and plot a path forward.

It likely won’t be easy, I’ve learned. And it is not a perfect science.

But I’ve also learned that letting go is so worth it.

The Egocentricity of Bad Luck

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard not to take bad luck personally.

I have this belief in karma. So when bad luck happens, I don’t just blame happenstance.

I mentally review my list of recent behaviors as if to find the source of the bad luck. As if I somehow “created” it. Sometimes I believe I do.

That actually seems a bit silly. It reads as if I believe there is some kind of “tit for tat” accounting system in the Universe that rewards people (okay, me) for my good behavior and punishes for my bad behavior.

If the Universe IS trying to punish and teach me a lesson, it is a little bit of overkill. I beat myself up thoroughly enough over real or imagined harm I have done to others.

I can be spleeny and petty, I grant you. I am trying to come to grips with that. But I also have deep spiritual faith. So I actually do believe on some level that bad actions are punished and good behavior is rewarded. Eventually. Granted, it may be on our deathbed.

I know that seems a little silly. It is hard to imagine “god” (whoever or whatever we conceive him/her to be), sitting up on a big white cloud doing accounting all day.

I mean, given the size of the world population, god’s accounting firm in charge of “good” and “bad” behavior must be vast. And I can think of no greater irony for someone who has lived a life worthy enough to land them in heaven to spend an eternity doing accounting in god’s firm. Of any kind.

So my spleeniness challenges me. It is embarrassing to disclose what a kick I get out of my revenge fantasies. “I will do this bad thing to this abuser” and “that bad thing to that other abuser.” The fantasies get so convoluted and ornate that I can be very well pleased with myself for their sheer creativity.

What I am supposed to do for spiritual and emotional growth in the face of “bad luck” – I have read – is to let go. Release the offending incident and the offenders. Karma is supposed to have its way with them. Rotten fruit eventually falls from the tree and all that.

It is laudable when business success is attributed strictly to “good luck” and “talent” and “hard work.” It rarely is the whole picture.

Ruthlessness is an essential quality when your primary goals are to beat the competition and rise to the top of however you define success. Wealth. Power. Privilege. Access. Freedom.

Most of us want to get there or to some semblance of there. Not a great many do.

Those who do are not always eager to share the secrets of their success at the outset. Well, at least not until they are well-settled and satisfied with the level of success they have personally achieved.

Or they get old and start stock-taking. It is usually only then they can turn around to face the masses and imbue them with the “wisdom” they gained to get where they got.

When the superrich encounter bad luck, I am sure they just mow their competition down. They don’t give a fiddler’s fig about the impact steamrollering the opposition will have if less than ethical strategies work in their best interest.

So when bad luck descends, where do you go with it in your mind? Do you use “stock excuses”? “If I hadn’t done this, then that wouldn’t have happened.” “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.” And so on.

The truth is we don’t always necessarily know why bad luck happens. We just know it is part of life. The losses and insults we have to process are on a very wide continuum indeed. There is a planet of difference between losing an expensive pair of glasses and losing a limb in combat.

But processing bad luck goes through some predictable stages. And ultimately, the response always comes back to what we can and cannot control about the bad luck that has befallen us.

We can go to an optician to replace a pair of glasses. We can undertake the difficult process of rehabilitation in the face of a lost limb. Though the losses vary in scope, whatever issue you are facing must ultimately be addressed in the same way.

So use whatever justification is necessary in the face of bad luck to process and make sense of it for yourself. Maybe it is your karma. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe you should have been more careful with those glasses. Maybe you should have never signed up with the military.

Every action we take has inherent risks. Heck, every day on the planet is a risk. Some people who got up this morning won’t see tomorrow.

I do find it helpful to try to put my bad luck in perspective. There is that old Chinese proverb about the farmer whose horse runs away. Everyone sees it as bad luck until the escaped horse returns with a herd of mares, thus adding to his wealth.

The caution is inherent in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, If: “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”

Maybe my recent bad luck has nothing whatsoever to do with me or karma or the wrong place at the wrong time. But as I said initially, it is sometimes hard to recognize that in the first blush of searing disappointment or loss.

I need to keep working on keeping myself emotionally and spiritually balanced in the face of “bad luck.” Thankfully, in this instance at least, nobody died.

For that, I feel grateful and profoundly lucky. Always.

Shot Down

I wish I was spiritually evolved enough to roll with life’s punches and “see the lesson” in them as they hit. I am not. I ruminate more than I should over woundings and insults whether they are hurled intentionally or not.

The house build behind us is moving forward. I did everything I could to intervene and stop it. I stalled it by a month but my overall attempt has failed. The house markers have been set in the ground. A white pickup truck with an engineering logo on its side doors regularly visits the property no doubt finalizing the build strategy. The Wildlife Commission wrote an email this week to say there is no gopher tortoise violation on the “subject property” as I had hoped.

The die – as they say – appear to have been cast.

Part of me thinks this is instant karma. Punishment from the Universe for cutting a real estate agent we’d been working with – no binding contract but more of an implicit arrangement – out of the closing. We had to move fast and efficiently to get the house, I reckoned. Part of me knows I am rationalizing.

Fear-based thinking. Again.

There was a something that lingered in the air above this house deal though. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. That may sound a little too flakey for most of you. It is too flakey and “oooie, oooie” for me to take seriously. But I wonder.

I think of all the ways in which this development could be worse. I think of the chaos and upheaval of Israelis and Palestinians preparing for the savagery of war. I reflect on seeing an arm uncovered in the rubble of that Gaza hospital and the horrible news that will be delivered to a family. Many families in this case. I think about Ukrainians returning to where their family homes once stood and learn they have been obliterated by bombs.

My troubles are so small by comparison. Miniscule. But they are my troubles. I feel I need to stand up for them and give them their emotional due. I spent years ignoring and diminishing hurtful events in my life. They just backed up inside of me.

I would explode disproportionately when some other minor insult triggered the backed up, unhealed hurt inside of me. The earlier hurt hadn’t been dealt with so it could dissipate. It had merely gone underground waiting to rear its ugly head when triggered – usually by a more minor threat by a relatively innocent bystander.

It is common for people to ignore or diminish troubles of others when those troubles don’t affect them personally. There is a human tendency to feel a sense of sympathy and concern about others’ misfortunes and an equal measure of relief because it isn’t happening to them.

We all encounter problems on our journey in life. Mostly we are thankful when someone else’s tragedy does not touch our own life. When tragedy does strike us, we pray for the grace and strength to face and overcome it. It is one of life’s toughest learnings.

People are not comfortable generally with strong feelings. Either their own or someone else’s. We like our shared illusion of a calm and stable society.

If strong feelings were easily accepted and as easily processed, the booze and illicit drug business would collapse. Angry people are called “hysterical” unless the listener has buy-in with the issue people are angry about. I think of Trump and his legions of followers who eagerly slurp up his incessant brand of outrage over hard done by “patriots” like him.

It is so automatic to shush a child who is crying healing tears. It is common to accuse a woman of “being dramatic” when a sudden, inconceivable loss bends her in half convulsed in tears. Or her husband has beaten her senseless and is holding her children hostage in a bitter custody case.

Unbelievably, Alex Jones accused grieving Sandy Hook parents of delusion when their children were mowed down by a madman toting an AR-15. Jones finally came to justice but not before numerous grieving parents were tortured and belittled by Jones’ ardent followers.

The insinuation of grief creeps slowly into our lives. It is easier to manage when we are young, we reason, because we are more resilient. We can certainly move on faster. When we’re older, the processing of grief is usually more internal. “Stiff, upper lip” syndrome comes into play.

Loss is a fact of life. Some losses we can easily identify and readily relate to. Other losses are more personal and nuanced. How we learn to handle loss is spread across a very wide continuum.

So I accept that I am on a grieving path. For trees. And a view. And a dream of peace and solitude that will soon be irrevocably shattered. Does it matter in the grand scheme of things? Of course not. But does it matter to me? Absolutely.

I have learned that self-love and self-respect means owning all of our feelings and failings and giving them their due until they have been integrated into your heart and psyche. Life is not an endless series of “happy, happy, happy.” I challenge anyone to show me someone whose life is.

Change is inevitable and pain is manageable. I take this recent loss as another opportunity to apply what I’ve learned about managing disappointment. And of course, I wish I didn’t have to. I’m only human, after all.