“I’m fifty years old! What have I accomplished! I feel like my life is slipping by at an ever increasing rate and I am not sure that I can look back and see that I have ever done anything significant. I feel such despair! How can I look at my life and not feel pretty down?”
How will karma judge our lives? That is the critical question and one that we will not get a firm answer to until we each ultimately cross over into the heaven world.
However this still begs the question: how will our lives eventually be judged? What if we never wrote a book, had children, were elected to any office or saved the world to muddle on for another complicated day? What if we perceive that we have lived out an ordinary life? We may or may not have gotten married or had any type of relationship. We may or may not have loved the jobs that earned us a living. We may have lived out a life of quiet desperation, hoping for recognition that never came.
Perhaps we suffered a series of losses, financial, personal, emotional, and for some, even spiritual. How can we balance these losses with how we have lived our lives? We glance back at our past and observe how we handled things. Sometimes we learned and sometimes we just repeated the same mistake over and over. Sometimes we nursed resentments that made us react in ways that seldom made us proud. Sometimes we looked into the mirror and were not always happy with the person who gazed back.
People are so hard on themselves. Perhaps at some point, we have all pondered how we will be judged at the crossover point. Many of us innocently believe that our lives will be judged by that one crystalline moment that will give special meaning to our lives. That one hoped-for moment of frozen-in-time energy that elegantly reflects who we are, is seldom that elegant or clearly defined.
We are the aggregate collection of ordinary moments we have lived each day. Billions of moments put together to create a soul constitute the body of life work that defines us.
Another way to look at our lives is that we are each a jigsaw puzzle. The more complicated we are as souls, the more dynamic a life we have lived, the more pieces there are to our personal jigsaw puzzle. However, every single piece of that puzzle is required to make us complete. Every second, a new piece is added to the puzzle and it will not be complete until the last second of the last breath that we take. For even as we are dying, we are creating karma: in death there is great karmic opportunity.
We cannot tell what a jigsaw puzzle looks like by looking at one piece or one single moment. We cannot even determine what shape the puzzle will be until we have found all the edges and the edge of anyone’s life cannot be determined until the last moment.
Karma must examine every single piece uniquely as well as in the aggregate. We are the sum total of all of our particular momentary parts. Some parts earn us positive karma and some earn us negative karma. However, even in this there are always going to be factors in mitigation that by necessity will preclude any simple judgment.
Karma must also examine our souls as three-dimensional puzzles as well, for each of our puzzle pieces will touch or impact someone else’s puzzle pieces. Like gears in a machine, one gear turning as its neighbor does: every single thing that we do affects someone else in some way. We do not live in a vacuum.
Karma is complicated because souls are complicated and the body of experiences of each person’s life defines that body of work. These include every word we have ever uttered and every single action taken: each one, endlessly balancing another.
Karma is every single action, reaction and ripple affect of those actions and reactions. No life can be fully judged by only one moment. Glancing back over our lives, consider the body of work that we represent. Perhaps we may not wish to be quite so hard on ourselves!
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