On Karma and Liberty

 It doesn’t matter what other people say or think, it only matters what you do.

~Marcus Aurelius, The Daily Stoic

A woman came to this site recently talking of "karma". Her husband was with the Other Woman and she was still hurting. She wanted some sort of universal justice, some indication that right wins, that cheating will be punished.

I'm 56 years old and still cling to my fiercely held conviction that life should be fair. Should, yes. But it's not.

And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move on with living our own lives rooted in our own values and letting go of the outcome. What's more, the sooner we do that, the sooner we'll realize that's enough. That though it's infuriating when the refs make the wrong call, when liars and cheaters get away with it, when the powerful hurt the weak, it doesn't change our fundamental responsibility to live our own lives with integrity, to refuse to get down in the mud, to accept that the only thing we can ever control is ourselves.

It sounds infuriating. I have a daughter, 22 years old, who's refusing to address a medical issue. What I want to do is drag her into a doctor's office and insist that she be treated. I won't. I can't. She's an adult. And what I'm learning is that the more I plead or cajole or shame, the more she digs in her heels. One would think I'd know this by now. I'm a slow learner.

But it's a reminder. That when we liberate others to live their own lives, we liberate ourselves. We are not responsible for whether he goes to therapy or his 12-step group. We are not responsible for whether he shows up to work on time, or whether he's too hungover to make that meeting, or whether he forgets to come to his son's soccer practice. He can bear the consequences of his own actions. We are only responsible for our own. My friend Betsy calls it "keeping my own side of the street clean."

Ignore the haters and the critics and the whisperers. They aren't living our lives. They'd do well to focus on their own. As my mother, a longtime 12-stepper used to put it, what others think of me is none of my business. So hard, I know. I often try to think of myself at my life's end. Will I really care what some mother of my kids' friend said about how I raised my children? Or what some person on the Internet said about staying with someone who cheated? Or what some woman cheating with my husband said about my marriage? Pretty sure I won't.

But back to karma. Oprah once said that the problem with karma is that we so rarely get to see it work. And though I don't believe in karma per se, I do believe we reap what we sow. Which means, if you're a fundamentally dishonest person who doesn't honour commitment then that's who you'll remain in any relationship. So, if that's who he is, then that's who she got. It hurts now because you thought he was different than that. It hurts because you're telling yourself a life about how it has something to do with your worth when really it's about his. It hurts because it hurts when people let us down. When we put on our perspectacles, as Glennon Doyle calls them, and realize we weren't seeing clearly. But now we do.

And that's the key here. Seeing clearly. Really understanding that we didn't lose a great guy, we lost the fantasy. Whether or not karma catches up with him isn't the point. By the time the misery and dysfunction he takes into a new relationship reveals itself, we'll no longer care. We'll be focused on ourselves and the life we've created, surrounded by others worthy of being there.