Karma

I think most everyone who know me know that I am very particular about what I watch on television. Well, I don't watch television anymore... I TiVo everything, because I hate commercials. Anyway, there are a select few shows that make it onto the TiVo. And some of them remain on the TiVo completely unwatched, at least for the moment (ahem, Desperate Housewives - I'm waiting for the whole season to be done so I can watch them all in one shot). To my utter surprise, the one show I did not expect to become hooked on has made a permanent appointment in my TiVo - Grey's Anatomy.

This week's episode was about Karma - good Karma, bad Karma. Life's unfairness... how things never turn out just how you imagine they would be. How good people seem to get crap and the not-so-good walk around content. How things always seem to, no matter how long ago they may have happened, come back and bite you in the ass (or in Addison's case, the vah-jay-jay, as Bailey calls it). Or that a bad experience may have helped you dodge a bullet later on.

I believe in karma. I always talk about "karmic retribution," the idea that every bad action you make will cause something bad to happen to you. But that's the negative spin on it... and mostly something I joke about. Seriously, though, I believe that there needs to be a balance. People who have had it way too easy early in life, who walk around believing the world is their oyster, will go through periods where things are completely unfair, where they can't seem to catch a break, get a date, make a deadline, whatever. People who have been through crap, where nothing seems to go right for a long time, will come to a point where things are good - and because of the bad, they truly appreciate it. And the pendulum always swings.

I have, by no means, lived a charmed life. But I believe that the hell and pain of graduate school (and all the things that happened in my life during that period) is being paid off by the happiness I have now in work and life in general. And I know that hard work helped to get me here. And whether it's deserved or not, I appreciate it all the more, I think, because I've experienced some every negative things. And I also know, that while I was in that negative place, I did not believe that it could get any better - I could not see the positive that would eventually come from it.

I know that the pendulum is still swinging. And that eventually, it will swing back in the other direction. But the balance is needed. People cannot appreciate the good without the bad... or else they begin to believe that they are entitled. And I never want to feel that way.