I remember when telling a friend that I had lost my baby, one of the things she said was that this was proof there couldn’t be a God, that after all my “good deeds” this has happened to me. I had a bit of a zealous Christian phase in my teens and my friend was a professed atheist. But how is it that when we seek to do good, bad happens to us all the same?
We do seem to be brought up to believe that good behaviour is rewarded. Santa comes to good boys and girls doesn’t he? So how is it that bad things happen despite the fact that we have been good?
Many years later when I was learning to meditate and joined the Buddhist meditation classes, there were Buddhist teachings in addition to the meditation. In one session she spoke about past lives and the fact that difficulties in this life were due to wrongdoings in the past. I didn’t find this all that helpful either. At the time my self esteem was very low and I was struggling so to be told that the difficulties I was having were due to some intangible culpability from a previous incarnation really didn’t help. It also wasn’t a big leap in my mind to look at people dealing with worse than me and ask did that mean that they were even worse than me last time round? It was an explanation I couldn’t stick with.
I do believe that we have existed in some way before, and this life carries imprints from previous lives, but not in a crime and punishment kind of way. The most helpful analogy of karma I have managed is that it is behaviours that we repeat until we learn better.
Before going any further I think it is important to say that I think it is widely accepted that anger and bargaining are part of the grieving process, so it is normal after a loss to feel anger that this has happened to you, and to ask why and wonder what could have been done differently. But perhaps we can differentiate between that being a stage in a process as opposed to a lens through which we view life as a whole.
Accepting that life might not have got the memo that I had “been good” so therefore should get good was a slow process for me. In the year or so before losing my baby I came across Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled”. I no longer have the book, but, paraphrasing, I remember the opening phrase was that life was tough, and it was only when we could accept this could we begin to transcend it. So how do we accept life’s losses and transcend them?
Firstly, I think allowing difficult feelings to just be without running away from them. If it is a fact that life is tough, then so it would follow that we will feel emotions that are sometimes labelled as negative, but maybe they aren’t. Maybe they are just part of the emotional range that comes with being human. It’s ok to be sad, it’s ok to feel angry. Perhaps we can learn to just be with those feelings. If we are feeling low, perhaps we can slow down and give ourselves some space. Recognising that we are finding something difficult might give us a better understanding of what our needs are.
There can be hidden gifts in the losses. Through our own pain and loss, we can have greater compassion and empathy for others and their losses. And in time, difficult times can be a source of wisdom. It has been suggested that happiness levels return to their baseline state after a big win so the pleasure in good things happening is transitory, whereas after a loss, there is the potential to review life and develop a deeper level of understanding and respect for the fragility of life, and to appreciate what we still have and is good more.
Thinking about the rewards for good, whether that is a place in heaven, a better life next time round, or just an easier time in this one, how good is our good if it is done so that we can have better?
A recent book I read “The Path” spoke about doing good in a capricious world and covered it very well. It said the good that is done so that on one can go to heaven, or be rewarded in some other way, is actually a very self serving good. It made me think of a line in a Saw Doctors song about buying shares in the afterlife. When we do good so that we can have good we are investing in ourselves rather than giving selflessly. A certain amount of investment in ourselves in this life is necessary to survive so I am not knocking it, but it’s different from an altruistic good, where we expect nothing in return. When something just feels like the right thing to do irrespective of what comes back to us. To me that is truly doing good.
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Books mentioned in this blog:
The Road Less Travelled Scott Peck
The Path Professor Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
Song:
Same oul' town The Saw Doctors
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