If Karma were merely a bitch…
KeithHandy posted in Your Soul on July 26th, 2007
When we first start believing in Karma — or at least in the broad general idea which basically is Karma, minus the flaky, bead-wearing, tie-dying, lava-lamping K-word — we think, “oh, that’s simple. Just do good things for other people, and then my life will improve.” Because for some reason we think while it’s really hard to do good things for ourselves, it’s somehow really easy to do good things for other people.
First of all… why do we think this?? I’m not talking about the act of putting aside one’s selfishness, which may be difficult in its own right. But suppose we’ve got that part nailed, we’re totally willing to be empathic, and psyched to give up that precious half hour out of our life to do some kind of good deed. Why do we think the good deed itself will be easy? As long as it’s not for us, it should be easy, we rationalize, because our judgement isn’t clouded by that person’s biases and short range whims. As if there wasn’t a much bigger cloud to deal with… the fact that we have absolutely no fucking idea what will make somebody else happy.
We could just randomly give stuff away, and randomly give time to other people. But that does no good if the people don’t like the stuff (or time) we’re giving them, especially if it’s stuff that we thought they’d like because we liked it, and now it’s totally going to waste because they have it and not us, and we’d sooner spend the next 20 years wishing they’d appreciate it than simply ask to have it back.
We don’t really know what other people need or want, because while they’ll be very vocal about short-range needs and wants (I want to go home and lie down, I want ice cream, etc.), people tend to be secretive about the things they really want, the big-picture long-haul things, the things they want the most. We guard our deepest desires as if they were dark secrets, occasionally letting a small sliver out to stand as the official public version of The Dream, and then we’re frustrated when well-meaning people see the tip as the iceberg, and try to help us entirely on that basis. (In fact, we get so good at this that we wind up hiding our desires from ourselves.)
The lead character in Wonderfalls grudgingly accepts the cryptic missions handed off to her by various inanimate animal faces, which ultimately lead to her helping somebody in some way. Along the way, she gets only a vague idea of what she’s doing for anyone, but by the end the real purpose (more ironic yet somehow less strange) to the madness reveals itself. Why isn’t she allowed to know until the end exactly what it is she’s accomplishing for them? Is it that, given a detailed plan and explanation, we would fuck it up by trying to take a shortcut, but as long as we’re only given hints at a time, we’ll stay on course? Or is it just the sheer randomness of life, whereby we can always have happy endings if we define every happy moment as an “ending” of some kind? Is it all down to where we draw the barlines, how we frame the shot, when we shut off the video camera or audio recorder, and/or when we end the conversation? Or is there such thing as actually doing something better?
We know when we’ve helped or inspired someone. They often let us know in glowing terms, and even when they don’t, we can “feel” it in a strange cosmic way. The thing to remember is that, like anything we do, some attempts to help or inspire people will fail. Possibly the vast majority. So while we may get some points for trying, we get a hell of a lot more points for succeeding. Simply putting in the half hour won’t do it — Karma doesn’t pay in hourly wages — we actually have to get the golf ball into the hole.
To make lots of money (one kind of karmic return, at first glance less mystical than most, but no less confounding) the supposed right way, we need to not only provide value to society — which is up to everyone but us to appraise — but actually enjoy doing it, so that it doesn’t kill us. Not to be cynical, but it seems like we either need to appeal to dumb people (because there are so many) or rich people (because we can charge more). I have no idea where the intersection lies between exactly what I can happily do and what people will pay for. There has to be an “a-ha!” moment, but there also have to be a hell of a lot of “hang in there” moments.
I’m pretty sure that my “a-ha!” moment won’t steer me 180 degrees away from my current direction (go into real estate, health care, or the priesthood) so much as add some missing ingredient (more visuals, more collaboration, more how-to). I call it “a 20 to 30 degree turn”. On a 2-D surface, this would give a fairly small set of options; on a 3-D surface it would be quite a bit more, but still, if I stretched out my tunnel vision to be more cone-shaped, I could manage to spot the answer pretty quickly. Life, however, is more like 100-D. The nature of the shift I need is probably not currently in my conscious mind, but once I look back at it, I’ll be saying, “well, duh”.
So how many possibilities are there to scour through in that 100-dimension 20 to 30 degree slice of everything? I don’t know. But I’m gonna put those guitar bits away for a while and play with Moho.
