Am I just a lousy planner, or what?  Yes, I’m still homeless, and now you can add disabled to the list of my current inadequacies.  I’m not fishing for the sympathy vote here– though a little chocolate never goes amiss in these circumstances.  I’m just trying to analyse how I came to be in such a mess so  I can avoid any repetition of it.  Was there something I should have known?  Or done differently?

I am now in northern Queensland, at a beautiful place right on the waterfront, directly opposite Dunk Island.  Couldn’t be nicer.  Except that there have been gale force winds — continuously– since I arrived, and a fair bit of rain with it.  Now that couldn’t be my fault.  I couldn’t have planned my much-needed break to coincide with such crumby weather.

And what about the sciatica?  Could I have avoided that? (Probably, but I don’t wish to engage in victim-blaming.  Especially when the so-called victim is me.)  I can only conclude that I have somehow acquired a virulent case of Bad Karma.

With that chilling thought clanging around in my befuddled head, I decided I needed to understand the notion of Karma a bit better.  So I googled it, and what I learned scares the bejeezus out of me.  It is a very interesting and complex concept, and I do not wish to trivialise it lest it come back to bite me in a future life.  (Sorry.  Couldn’t resist the cheap one-liner.)  Anyway, speaking of future lives, it is important to know that reincarnation is an essential feature of Karma, which is both good news and bad news.

The bad news is, if, in your past  or present life, you were a ratbag, your misdeeds will hang around like a bad smell, and haunt you with misfortune of one kind or another in this or future lives.  OR  –and here’s the good news–  you can rectify your errant ways by supplanting them with good deeds.  Hence, neither good Karma nor bad Karma are absolute.  Both are capable of being mitigated.  There is a lot of important stuff about how things are affected by one’s state of mind at the moment of death, and by various circumstances prevailing before birth, but I don’t really know enough to try to describe that.  I just wish to make the point that Karma is much more than the “what goes around comes around” idea that many people have about it.

Karma is serious religious philosophy, most notably associated with Buddhism, Hinduism, and other eastern religions.   So I was taken aback by the preponderance of  entries in the very erudite Urban Dictionary which didn’t even attempt to define it by more than  popular cliches.  Here are some examples, including some irreverent, but  funny ones which I couldn’t resist…

• “Karma’s a bitch” is probably the most common description, which I suppose suggests that most people associate it with the negative aspects or events in their lives.
• Ditto for “reaping what you have sown”

A couple of my faves were:

• George Bush is our Karma for not paying attention
• My Karma just ran over your Dogma
• And, finally, really bad Karma would hafta be … Having sex with a dead necrophiliac

Getting back to reincarnation for a moment — I have a high level of tolerance for the idea of reincarnation, as detailed in my philosophical treatise The Snowman Theory of Everlasting Life.  I suspect that is the reason for my angst about Karma — the possibility that I may actually have to own responsibility for what happens to me.  What a bummer that would be.

MM