I watched a Grey's Anatomy episode recently where a man was cheating on his wife and while he was with his affair partner, a wrecking ball came through the home where they were (instead of the neighbor's house that was supposed to be demolished), burying both him and his affair partner in the rubble of the house. The wife learned about the affair when the wrecking ball incident made the news. Is this a fictional example of karma?
Then last night I watched a movie called Moving On. A woman was raped by one of her best friend's husband decades earlier. In the movie, she showed up at her friend's funeral with the intent to kill him now that no harm could come to her friend. Spoiler alert, despite several almost successful attempts, in the end she watched him get run over by someone else in an accident in a parking lot. That's obviously another fictional example that mixes in a bit of the concept of revenge as well with the idea of karma getting the last say.
Fiction though is often based on what we believe about life. I have a friend that has told me many times, karma will come when I stop caring about the pain my ex-husband caused, when I finally let go. I don't know what to believe. So many people go through life treating everyone horribly and little bad seems to happen to them.
In searching for answers (you knew as an Enneagram five, I was going to research this), I came across this idea that karma matures. Karma is both the intentional action we take and the consequences that come from that action but there is a maturation process between the two. It's like the seeds of corn may get planted in the spring (the intentional action) but they aren't ready to harvest until the late summer/fall (the consequences of that intentional action). Many even believe that karma follows you from lifetime to lifetime so you may not see all the consequences until a future lifetime. Good and bad things can happen to us during this process where our karma is maturing and we can be collateral damage in someone else's karma.
I still don't know if I believe all of that. But what I do know is that when I do something good, I immediately feel good and when I do something bad, I immediately feel bad. For me there is an immediate effect to the intentional actions I take that in some ways follows the idea of karma. Furthermore, good decisions are more likely to result in good outcomes than bad decisions are.
When I reflect on my relationship with my now ex-husband and my role in it, I feel good about the part I played. Not that I was always perfect but throughout the years, I purposefully self-reflected and adjusted to grow as a partner and as a person. I loved as unconditionally as is possible in an adult relationship. I invested in him and in us. I supported him in his dreams. I made space for and encouraged his relationship with his mom despite how poorly she treated me.
All of those intentional actions I took made me feel good about myself and left room for me to still experience the joy in life. It meant the difference between a miserable existence and a challenging more neutral existence. That difference may seem small but it isn't. My ex-husband demonstrated what a miserable existence looks like and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Maybe that is the karma already at work. Although, really I would like to get to a point of indifference as to what karma he may or may not be experiencing.
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