Karma Is Hard To Understand

Last updated on: October 11, 2018 at 7:32 am by Ambaa Choate

Karma Is Hard To Understand 2018-10-11T07:32:26-04:00 Ambaa Choate

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Sometimes one person suffers so much that it boggles the mind. It’s very hard, probably actually impossible, to understand why one person would have to shoulder such a burden.

While I do believe in karma and perfect justice, it doesn’t feel right to say that someone deserved their fate. I think that’s a way for us to comfort ourselves. To say that person deserved it so it’s okay. And that can actually be really horrible.

I think karma is more complex than that and sometimes the things we suffer are not consequences of the actions of past lives but learning experiences we need to go through. But even that is deeply insensitive. To tell someone that they have to suffer as a learning experience…that is just incredibly obnoxious.

So I don’t know.

I found out yesterday that someone I knew died. He and I had dated a few times and though we realized we were not romantically compatible we remained friends. He was a veteran and he had lost both his legs in the war as well as having nerve damage to his hands. But he persevered and took up wheelchair racing. You would think that he had faced enough for one lifetime.

He moved to Florida and met the love of his life. They got married and had two children who are similar in ages to mine. And then he got cancer.

I watched through Facebook as he rapidly wasted away. I saw he and his wife fighting so hard to save him, trying every treatment they could, saving money to go to Europe for an experimental treatment. He got so thin that I wouldn’t have recognized him. Everytime he was well enough to go home it only lasted a few days before he was back in the hospital again.

And last month he died, leaving behind his devastated wife and two small children as well as an older child.

I don’t think I will ever understand why one person had to go through so much.

Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash

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