Karma is selfish

Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red, 1908

All I’m saying is there are certain things we don’t understand; I mean the world as a whole doesn’t. And way more things I personally don’t. For instance, only recently did I discover how you actually lose weight: I bet you didn’t know that about 84% of fat mass is actually exhaled as CO2, which fact you definitely don’t need to know in order to actually lose weight.

That’s how I feel about karma, I don’t understand it. It’s cryptic and unintelligible… eppur si muove.

The other day I was walking toward the gate in my apartment garage, AirPods in listening to Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories. If you haven’t listened suffice it to say it’s absorbing, to the point where baseline social skills become inoperative. I unlocked the gate and tapped the elevator up button. Behind me I noticed through my absent stare a woman fumbling in her pockets for her keys while burdened by several things in each hand. I leapt over to open the gate for her, and she thanked me with a big smile, and probably some words I missed.

Performing small gestures of kindness, I’ve found, makes me happy in a kind of soul-aligningly resonant way. It tells me you did right, with an internal smile and nod.

I like to believe these things come back around; you do something nice, others do nice things for you. Of course, that’s not always how it works. But that got me thinking, does that even matter to me?

My initial answer is yes, I like when people hold doors open for me, or let me into the right lane when I need turn at the next light.

But that doesn’t really explain why I do it, why I opt for menial gestures of good. I never really expected that same grocery-bag-saddled woman from earlier to pop out of nowhere and hold a door open for me later that day, or year, or ever. No such cause-and-effect mechanism exists, tying my good deeds inextricably to those of others.

For me, it comes down to alignment. We all have that voice in our heads, our conscience as we sometimes call it. It tells us at all times what’s the right thing to do. Even though we can choose to ignore it, it’s there, listening, presiding over our lives like a mentor of menschdom. And maybe this is a selfish way to look at it, but being in alignment with that voice is as much for myself as for anyone else. I like what holding the door open for that woman did for me. It’s true in some corporeal sense, she was the recipient of all the benefits of my actions. But internally, in a place I’ll carry with me well after the benefits conferred upon her by such a gesture subside, I am the lucky one. I’m the one who carries forward this sense of personal alignment with how I want to be in this world. And that never goes away.

Karma, for me, is just that: some abstract idea of alignment. One that, downstream, orients the way I live in the world from the inside-out. The voice speaks, I listen. External manifestations of this mentality feed back into my internal voices strength, telling it to continue to speak up. It does just that, creating a virtuous cycle that finds the strength of an operatic singer belting out melodies from ever deeper within. It’s the give that keeps on gifting.