After watching one too many My Name Is Earl episodes back to back, I suddenly realized that there might be something to karma. For those who don’t know the show, it basically features the protagonist ‘white trash’ Earl who after winning the lottery decides to make a list of everything he’s done wrong in his criminal past and fix one thing every episode.
Away from any religious connotations of reincarnation, the general philosophy of karma makes sense: where one’s life is governed by the actions they have done, are doing and will do. And from all of that we form our life experiences inspiring a million cliches like “what goes around comes around”, “every action has an equal and proportionate reaction”, “coming back to bite you in the rear” and pretty much the lyrics to Radiohead’s Karma Police.
Is there any truth to it though? Whether you believe in God and religion or not, is there perhaps on a superficial level some thing that connects our lives to a greater scheme, where every move we make sets off a series of unforeseen events? This concept is at heart of so much of both science and religion; that cause and effect that inspires more cliches like a ripple effect and a domino effect. But then again if we do put a little, faith, in this concept we might be admitting to the need for something to tie it all together, the same way that the ripple effect is contained within a body of water: something definable like a pond or a river. But at the center of where we stand, the point where the stone drops, we don’t have a wide enough lens to see the river bank. Maybe it’s God maybe it’s the universe, maybe it’s both, maybe, if you believe it, none of that exists and everything is just random: our world consists of complete chaos and we’re just too involved, getting too carried away with conspiracy theories of the universe, looking for patterns in that chaos; searching for reason in the madness.
Maybe I should make a list like Earl’s and try to make right all my wrongs before I grow too old and accumulate to many. It’s not like I have a criminal history but I would like to balance out my universe, in the metaphorical sense of the word.
We all should…we all should schedule meetings with ourselves every single night as we lay in bed before calling it a night!
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Growing up, I’ve always heard people around me reiterating ‘everything happens for a reason.’ The days have proven so as well, but what’s really mind-wrecking and just a complete nuisance is that we – relatively on many occassions – never know what this particular reason is … Something happens, but it didn’t just happen just because. There must be a reason behind it! But what is that reason?! More often than not, when I do something, say something, hear something, or something in my life happens I stop to think of what just happened has some time of significance and might be tied into something bigger – perhpas a thing beyond the scope of my mind and even the human mind, period…and so I’ve concluded that life is the biggest puzzle out there, with a gazillion pieces which some of us never get to finish putting together!
i believe we will live our lives trying to figure life out.. and even when we do die.. we would still not have figured it out…
As a philosophy and politics student, just a piece of advice…….Don’t think about it, it’ll make you go mad.
Iman,
What do you get, or what happens when you finish putting this “puzzle” together?
yes indeed sumaya, it’s enough living it 🙂
nas, first thing on your list should be the day you scared mom to death with the dead garden snake on her back. i think she still has dreams about that one.