hold your breath, you just might die.

I had an interesting conversation the other night with one of the people who contributed their personal beliefs and convictions to my last entry, "this we believe". Let's call her Daisy. Daisy's contribution revolved around the subject of karma, an interesting, and to me somewhat problematic, concept "which explains causality through a system where beneficial effects are derived from past beneficial actions and harmful effects from past harmful actions, creating a system of actions and reactions throughout a soul's reincarnated lives forming a cycle of rebirth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_(Hinduism).

That's all well and good but, in my opinion, most people who believe in and preach about the power of karma do so from a position of resentment, hoping and relying on the notion that one day someone or something that caused them immediate harm will get theirs. I've never heard someone who so firmly believed in karma talk about all those beneficial effects deriving from past beneficial actions, and so my definition as karma is something more along the lines of a Carrie Fisher quote: "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die".

Daisy said "I gotta tell myself 'it's gonna come back to them' to even make it through the day sometimes. Everybody needs something to believe in. Something to reassure themselves that it'll all work out fairly". I felt that and took a moment to internalize what exactly she was saying because I too had been there. We all know how it feels to just want things to be fair. But that's just it. Things are never exactly fair, no matter how much we desperately want or need them to be.

This all reminds me of a Bon Iver song, "The Wolves". Ellie Goulding (whom I'm somewhat obsessed with) did a cover that I actually prefer but the song talks about parting ways with a loved one and how, more times than not, one person moves on before the other. She sings,

"Someday my pain, someday my pain
Will mark you
Harness your blame, harness your blame
And walk through"

It's as if she's waiting for the day it'll all come back around to him and he'll "harness" the blame in her hurt. Sounds fair, right? But then again there's a good chance he just might move on happily forever and never look back and that while she's singing, "what might have been lost -", he's saying "don't bother me". And what's worse than indifference when you're still hurting>

But, as I told Daisy, "Life isn't fair. Bad things happen to good people. Amazing things happen to terrible people. I believe in closure, in carrying on with the process of living even if those who harm us never see reprimand, even if they're never apologetic or aware of the fact they've hurt us. I believe happiness and the ability to heal should not and cannot be on the condition that someone eventually gets theirs. We'd hold our breath for such and well, quite honestly might die waiting for it".