Karma, prayers and others

What is karma?

We have a very simple one word in bangla to describe all that karma implies, “kormofol”, basically what it means is that ‘you reap what you sow’. Now wiser men than me have always said that… they’ve said it over the ages… decade after decade… yet, the simple man still is more likely to blame their misfortune or lack of fortune on their lack of “luck”. Now what is luck? being at the right place at the right time? No one achieves anything like that. Show me a man who is lucky and I will show you the years of work that he’s already put in there before he got to the point where other’s refer to him as lucky. Simply put luck is the combination of hard work, consistency, sincerity etc. All the stuff that takes a lot of hard work to build into one’s character.

I meet or am greeted by a lot of chronically jobless person. You know the one thing they have in common? Inconsistency. They are inconsistent in their actions, in their jobs. And all these supposedly free people are the worst people to give any job to, ask them to do something for you and it will never be delivered on time. In fact more often than not, they will fail to even apply for jobs on time. Yet, year after year, they will blame their luck, lack of support, lack of nepotism, as the reason for their joblessness. If these people stop for just a moment and really take stock, they might actually discover that either they are aiming for the wrong jobs, have the wrong or no qualifications or lack communication skills. Problem is because they are so busy finding other scapegoat excuses, they completely miss out on the opportunity to better themselves. And talking to these people is the same as trying to wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep. You can wake up a sleeping person but you can’t shake awake a person who is busy pretending to be asleep. With eyes wide shut they go through their lives with various scapegoats to blame their failures on.

I am not infallible. I catch myself blaming certain things on certain factors too. Then I catch myself, shake myself out of it and move on. Change is the only constant thing in life. And the biggest difference is that I know that I am not perfect and I know that I still have a LONG way to go, a lot to learn and I am not going to pretend to be asleep when I am awake.

Then sometimes I catch myself wanting to pray. The ritualistic prayers. Lets get one thing clear, I have prayed. I was brought up in a very conservative religious household. Religion was shoved down our throats at every single opportunity. It got to the point, where in one point of my life, I rejected religion. No one could answer my question – Was religion made for humans? Or was human made for religion? Who controls whom? What is religion anyway? I started searching, seeking answers. I met people or rather priests from almost all religions and here’s what I learnt:

All religions are the same.

There’s one God. He has one name. His name is blessed.

All humans are equal. Human beings were created in love.

Then why do we have so much division in the name of religion? Why can’t we respect someone else’s religion or their way of praying? What difference does it make whether I go ring a bell in a temple? light a candle in a church? Or bow down in prayer in a mosque? All these people fighting over religious differences, calling others atheist, declaring that all who don’t follow them are going to hell…. is that what their God said? Is that what is written in their books?

Today when I felt like bowing down in prayer, I remembered that the biggest expression of our prayer is our work, our attitude, our humanity. The empathy and love that we are all capable of … yet so often lose when it comes to our day-to-day dealing. Leave someone smiling today, remove someone’s sadness and that in my book is a successful prayer right there. If I leave someone else better than how I found them, then I have done a little bit more in fulfilling my destiny, my reason for existing in this world, for having been created as the best creature in this world.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on where my life is headed. I need to get that picture in my head. The picture of where I want to be 5 years from now or 10 years from now. It is only when I know where I am headed that I will reach there. And that has got nothing to do with ‘luck’ or ‘karma’. It will have everything to do with the amount of effort I put into making that dream a reality. I know that I can achieve anything that I set my mind on. It’s the same with all of us. Dream … and dream big… then work your ass off to bring that into fruition.

And that’s why Karma is a Bitch whom I like very much! Because it comes back to bite you on the ass when you least expect it 😀 

But this isn’t about how what goes around, comes around… this is about reaping what you sow 😀