Thursday, August 19, 2004
A Balanced Universe
I had a discussion with The Mac several months ago about luck. He was having a patch of Very Bad Luck, and my contention was that luck balances out, eventually. Not everything can go wrong all the time, and not everything can go right all the time, either. Whether you call it luck, or karma, or fate, or whatever, or if you believe there’s something else out there (like a higher power) that metes out good and bad, or even if you think aliens are in total control of your life as an experiment, it’s all about balance.
I used to keep a little “luck journal” when I was in high school, chronicling the positives and negatives I experienced. It mostly balanced out to neutral, and the best you can hope for is that it balances out slightly positive. If you have too much positive at any one time in any one place, a big negative will come along to cancel it all out, so you don’t want to get up too high. Like Agent Smith says, in the first Matrix movie, people seem to crave conflict, adversity - they rejected the utopia the machines had built for them because it was “too perfect”. Too much positive never sits well – it’s like you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lately, I have noticed the balancing effect. For well over a year now, my personal life had been isolative. The romantic aspects of my life, well, let’s admit it, they sucked large. The last relationship I was in was quite awful for reasons too numerous to mention here, and after we broke up, there was nothing for a long time (which I didn’t mind that much). Very, very recently, I met a great guy, and have started seeing him. Well, it seems the Universe has to balance out that positive with a negative somehow, so it attacked my financial status (which was fantastic when I was seeing the last guy) and gave me something to deal with that quite frankly sucks. It also toyed with my car, which may be related to the whole financial status thing, but that problem seems to be “in remission” right now. I took the Tiny Car in to the shop, and they "couldn’t duplicate problem” (it's written on the slip they gave me), so it was returned to me, unaltered. I have no idea whether it will die soon, or if it will be just fine, but I suspect that if I experience another large positive, especially in the near future, the Tiny Car’s fate will be at stake.
Now I haven’t recorded all of this in a “luck journal” or anything, but I’d have to say I think it balances out. I have no idea whether the thing with the guy is as a result of the terrible financial position I’m in, or if it’s the other way around. But if you don’t believe in to coincidence (and of course I do, but I’m just sayin’), it’s easy to say it’s all related.
This balancing thing is kind of difficult to deal with because in a way, it negates the need to do good to achieve good karma, which a lot of people rely on. I can say that it doesn’t seem to matter how much good I do, my life just stays in balance. My observation is that whether you’re a good person or a bad one, you just seem to carry on. Sometimes fate metes out visible good things to some, and obviously bad things to others, but again, there is that neverending balance, and you won’t recognize it until you measure out the whole life’s worth. Life and death balance one another, too. You live a life, and it has to be balanced out by a death at the end of it. Usually, death is fairly painful, from what I can gather. It’s not punishment of any sort – it’s balancing out all the good things in life that were achieved, like life itself. Experience, feeling, emotion, knowledge, perception are pretty positive things that eventually have to get balanced off. Death’ll do that.
Once upon a time, during a conversation about who would be enslaved if aliens conquered the world, I claimed I’d be fine because I’m the most exceptionally average person I know. I don’t excel at any one thing, and I don’t abysmally fail at the things I do either. I maintain. It’s my guess that the aliens would target the strong, and possibly the weak to cull the herd, but they’d leave the average people alone so they could be put to work. Or eaten, if that’s their thing, but hopefully, just put to work. I endeavour to achieve neutrality in most things, achieving neither a positive nor a negative that would require large amounts of balancing. Balancing is hard – it’s adjustment, and change. It can be brutal. After the balancing, a new neutral has to be attained. I say accept the neutral. Be content with neutral.
And I was content with neutral (reasonable work life, nonexistent love life, maintainable home life) up until last weekend, which is when I really started to get more involved with this guy. It raises the question – was this some sort of plan? Was there something plotting my course? Was it, in fact, pre-ordained? Is everything we do just another step along a pathway that has already been laid out for us? Or do we make our own fates, by choosing our actions and creating consequences? How far out do these consequences reach? Is there anything connecting the actions of our past to the actions of our future other than the actions of our present?
How could I know that I’d meet a great guy? Because I would have had to know in order to start myself on the path to poor finances that I’m at now. Or, alternatively, how did my poor finances cause me to meet this guy? I don’t think it’s quite that related. The luck is independent, somehow. It’s just there as an average, a balance.
The Mac, of course, completely disagrees with my theory. He has experienced an extended patch of Very Bad to just Plain Ol’ Bad luck. His house was broken-into, and those fuckers stole a bunch of stuff, including The Mac’s irreplaceable thesis. His car broke down and was VERY expensive to fix. The Mac cannot work in America because he is on a Student Visa, so he can’t just make money. The Mac’s other car’s air conditioning malfunctioned and needed to be fixed for more money. The Mac has no prospects on the go for a romantic liaison, although he is very cool, deserving and a “good catch”.
But The Mac forgets about the good things, like his pets, who are great. The Mac forgets that he has people who love him dearly and would do anything for him (including attempting to buy a door at Lowes, which is a dreadful task). The Mac forgets that he is on the road to Great Respect and a possibly prosperous career (if he can get this new thesis done in time!), something which none of our immediate family has done before. I’m not even sure the other people in the extended family have gotten doctorates, except maybe our cousin, Alan. He might have one, or then again, he might just have several undergrad degrees and a Master or two, and a lot of experience and a lucrative career in something to do with algorithms and computer stuff. Come to think of it, I can’t put my finger on any of the cousins who have doctorates.
Maybe The Mac’s recent bad luck is balancing out the extreme positive of a doctorate degree. Regardless, I believe it will all balance out in the end.
I used to keep a little “luck journal” when I was in high school, chronicling the positives and negatives I experienced. It mostly balanced out to neutral, and the best you can hope for is that it balances out slightly positive. If you have too much positive at any one time in any one place, a big negative will come along to cancel it all out, so you don’t want to get up too high. Like Agent Smith says, in the first Matrix movie, people seem to crave conflict, adversity - they rejected the utopia the machines had built for them because it was “too perfect”. Too much positive never sits well – it’s like you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lately, I have noticed the balancing effect. For well over a year now, my personal life had been isolative. The romantic aspects of my life, well, let’s admit it, they sucked large. The last relationship I was in was quite awful for reasons too numerous to mention here, and after we broke up, there was nothing for a long time (which I didn’t mind that much). Very, very recently, I met a great guy, and have started seeing him. Well, it seems the Universe has to balance out that positive with a negative somehow, so it attacked my financial status (which was fantastic when I was seeing the last guy) and gave me something to deal with that quite frankly sucks. It also toyed with my car, which may be related to the whole financial status thing, but that problem seems to be “in remission” right now. I took the Tiny Car in to the shop, and they "couldn’t duplicate problem” (it's written on the slip they gave me), so it was returned to me, unaltered. I have no idea whether it will die soon, or if it will be just fine, but I suspect that if I experience another large positive, especially in the near future, the Tiny Car’s fate will be at stake.
Now I haven’t recorded all of this in a “luck journal” or anything, but I’d have to say I think it balances out. I have no idea whether the thing with the guy is as a result of the terrible financial position I’m in, or if it’s the other way around. But if you don’t believe in to coincidence (and of course I do, but I’m just sayin’), it’s easy to say it’s all related.
This balancing thing is kind of difficult to deal with because in a way, it negates the need to do good to achieve good karma, which a lot of people rely on. I can say that it doesn’t seem to matter how much good I do, my life just stays in balance. My observation is that whether you’re a good person or a bad one, you just seem to carry on. Sometimes fate metes out visible good things to some, and obviously bad things to others, but again, there is that neverending balance, and you won’t recognize it until you measure out the whole life’s worth. Life and death balance one another, too. You live a life, and it has to be balanced out by a death at the end of it. Usually, death is fairly painful, from what I can gather. It’s not punishment of any sort – it’s balancing out all the good things in life that were achieved, like life itself. Experience, feeling, emotion, knowledge, perception are pretty positive things that eventually have to get balanced off. Death’ll do that.
Once upon a time, during a conversation about who would be enslaved if aliens conquered the world, I claimed I’d be fine because I’m the most exceptionally average person I know. I don’t excel at any one thing, and I don’t abysmally fail at the things I do either. I maintain. It’s my guess that the aliens would target the strong, and possibly the weak to cull the herd, but they’d leave the average people alone so they could be put to work. Or eaten, if that’s their thing, but hopefully, just put to work. I endeavour to achieve neutrality in most things, achieving neither a positive nor a negative that would require large amounts of balancing. Balancing is hard – it’s adjustment, and change. It can be brutal. After the balancing, a new neutral has to be attained. I say accept the neutral. Be content with neutral.
And I was content with neutral (reasonable work life, nonexistent love life, maintainable home life) up until last weekend, which is when I really started to get more involved with this guy. It raises the question – was this some sort of plan? Was there something plotting my course? Was it, in fact, pre-ordained? Is everything we do just another step along a pathway that has already been laid out for us? Or do we make our own fates, by choosing our actions and creating consequences? How far out do these consequences reach? Is there anything connecting the actions of our past to the actions of our future other than the actions of our present?
How could I know that I’d meet a great guy? Because I would have had to know in order to start myself on the path to poor finances that I’m at now. Or, alternatively, how did my poor finances cause me to meet this guy? I don’t think it’s quite that related. The luck is independent, somehow. It’s just there as an average, a balance.
The Mac, of course, completely disagrees with my theory. He has experienced an extended patch of Very Bad to just Plain Ol’ Bad luck. His house was broken-into, and those fuckers stole a bunch of stuff, including The Mac’s irreplaceable thesis. His car broke down and was VERY expensive to fix. The Mac cannot work in America because he is on a Student Visa, so he can’t just make money. The Mac’s other car’s air conditioning malfunctioned and needed to be fixed for more money. The Mac has no prospects on the go for a romantic liaison, although he is very cool, deserving and a “good catch”.
But The Mac forgets about the good things, like his pets, who are great. The Mac forgets that he has people who love him dearly and would do anything for him (including attempting to buy a door at Lowes, which is a dreadful task). The Mac forgets that he is on the road to Great Respect and a possibly prosperous career (if he can get this new thesis done in time!), something which none of our immediate family has done before. I’m not even sure the other people in the extended family have gotten doctorates, except maybe our cousin, Alan. He might have one, or then again, he might just have several undergrad degrees and a Master or two, and a lot of experience and a lucrative career in something to do with algorithms and computer stuff. Come to think of it, I can’t put my finger on any of the cousins who have doctorates.
Maybe The Mac’s recent bad luck is balancing out the extreme positive of a doctorate degree. Regardless, I believe it will all balance out in the end.
