You know that law of karma that you hear all the time, what goes around comes around? I pretty much adhere to this belief, but sometimes its immediacy can be quite disarming. Take a morning earlier this week for example. I have a regular routine of exercise that I do with a series of videos and often while I’m changing them a TV channel pops in with the news. I happened to be enjoying a particularly beautiful red sunrise as well as the heavenly warm weather that has been a recent gift from Mother Nature, when endless bad news from one of the local channels started to take over the room. I thought to myself, could we have some happy news for a change please? I rolled my eyes in silent Zen frustration and went back to my workout.

About fifteen minutes and a quick shower later, I switched on another local news channel that had its weekly feature of Wednesday’s Wacky Websites. Today’s website:  happynews.com. How’s that for a quick come back? It also falls along the lines of “what you send out you get back”, and “ask and ye shall receive”. It was one of those times when you wish your cats were truly conversant in the English language because nobody else was there to witness this spectacular little event unfold. Well, at least they were there!

This gave me pause for thought, what if we really understood the laws of karma – would we act any differently? And another question that was directed towards me recently, what about the karma resulting from our reaction to karma? I’m not a karma buff, but I do believe that the choices we make are very much like the ripples in a pond once we’ve thrown our stone into it; there is no denying cause and effect. Sometimes it’s just a ripple, sometimes it’s a tsunami.

One area I have done a lot of study in is that of spirituality. I spent over a dozen years attending weekly spiritual development courses with a medium, recognised as a minister in one of the city’s spiritual churches. It provided an enlightening forum within which I was able to learn extensively about universal laws along with their applications. It’s one thing to learn a teaching, it’s another to embrace it and walk with it.

As humans, I think some of our greatest teachings occur in the realm of our emotions. It is within this realm that we are at our most vulnerable, and sometimes our most primitive. I’ve always found it slightly absurd that the last thing we ever learn in our schools is how to understand and take responsibility for our emotions and our selves. Unless you are blessed with progressive and evolved parents, you’re pretty much on your own out there. You can learn about physics and chemistry, but heaven help you if you want to try to understand yourself, never mind others.

When I observe people around me, I’m often taken aback by their lack of accountability. By this I mean that basically a lot of people choose to lie and cheat, to themselves and to others, and think that if they don’t get caught, everything is okay. It’s like being in candy store after hours and having the freedom to do as you please. Do you pay for what you’ve sampled, or do you delight in what is there to take “for free”? Do you really believe that anything is “free”?

In our society of instant gratification, it can be too easy to explain away the consequences of something we want to have right away, but everything has its time and its reason. Are you willing to do the work to discover what these may be? Or do you need immediate results, willing to gamble for what you want at any cost?

Being a survivor of the dating scene for many a decade I can tell you that it’s one of life’s biggest classrooms. There’s nothing like putting yourself out there with a stranger to help you to get to know yourself better. There are endless questions one can ask oneself: What are my expectations from this person? Am I being honest with this person? Am I being honest with myself? Am I too needy? Is the other person? Am I being realistic about what this relationship could offer? Am I willing to hear the truth? Can I handle the truth? Can they?

I was in one brief and very tentative relationship where I quickly realised that, as much as I liked the person I was getting to know, I did not see a future with them. Even in my attempts to stay in the moment and its possibilities, I could see that this person had already arranged for the announcement in the paper, if you know what I mean. How can you stay in the moment when the other person is already way ahead of you in a future of their mind’s own making? Unfortunately, you might have the unpleasant task of having to back them up into the now, derailing their express train to happiness. This can come across as a very cruel act and, in this particular case, it was a truth that this other person could not and would not accept. But, I felt I had no other option. If I allowed things to continue at this other person’s pace, I wouldn’t be honouring my truth, and a later derailment would probably be many times worse, for both parties.

Well, things quickly did go from bad to worse. After I stopped the relationship from going any further, this person fell into a deep depression, went on sick leave, ended up under heavy medication, gained a lot of weight, and yet still felt their fate inextricably linked to mine.  Obviously I felt very bad about this and acknowledged my share of responsibility for what happened, but ultimately I maintained my belief that the truth would set me free, and the other person as well. My feeling after two years of attempting to establish a healthy distance from this person was that they still felt I owed them something and there was nothing I could do to shake this belief. I would never be able to resolve the issue because the issue was that I was not in love with this person. Living in illusion does not a future make.

So what did I take away from this experience? That even when you are being as honest and caring as you know how to be, you can still have a very negative impact on someone. And you can never change how another person feels, you can only change your actions and reactions to the people and events around you.

Like many, I’ve had my share of disappointments and have also caused disappointment in others. That’s life. And now, more than ever, I choose very carefully which words and actions I send out to others, because I understand my responsibility towards others and most importantly towards myself. I often come back to the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes even your best intentions, like a boomerang, can come back and hit you in the head. Be aware. Be very aware!