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What do you think when something wrong happens to you? Like losing something or someone. Your mind invariably rushes to find a reason, mostly in your past undertakings. You want to eke out an explanation, struggling to sooth your senses with a convincing narrative, a believable causality. And in the process, your mind plays tricks on you, furnishing justifications out of your memory, but mostly imagination, till you are convinced that ‘you deserved it’. The real draw of that realization is satisfaction and your ability to embrace the reality as it is. Till the time you get a clean road leading back to your past karma, you suffer anxiety and self-denial, and once the path appears clearly, you are ready for the next event. But what if the cause is not in the past, but instead in the future? What if life is not punishing you, but instead preparing you for what’s to come? Will it make you look at events just as they are, instead of attributing any causality to it? Perhaps.
Across religions, one of the accepted doctrines is that one can’t escape the fruits of his or her actions. The Abrahamic religions often anchor the fruit to the judgement day, whereas the oriental spiritual treatise renders a more near real-time settlement. This inescapable cause-effect cycle of action and reaction is as iron-clad as the Newton’s Third Law or Galileo’s gravity – it acts on you even after you are dead. View this from the lens of quantum mechanics and you realise that your entire life unfolds in a time-space fabric and the net energy you create –both positive and negative—comes spiralling back to you.
When you shift your paradigm from finding a cause in the past to leaving the effect to the future, you lead a much more confident life. Life gives you exactly the experience that’s important for your spiritual growth. So, if something perpetrates on you, you must understand that it’s in service of a different you in the future. If you lose something or someone, take it as a shot in the arm or an inoculation that prepares you for what’s to come next. Instead of looking backward, you look forward. Instead of asking. ‘Why life is punishing me?’, rather ask, ‘What’s life preparing me for?’
This upending of logic, where you embrace the effect instead of wondering about the cause, equips you well to manage life’s randomness. Yes, life’s random and we fools seek order, rationale, neat causalities, and command over the proceedings. This gap or friction between what’s happening to you and your expectation of it, is indeed the cause of suffering. We tend to pacify our anxious mind by offering it a narrative, and if that works, my appeal is to trade the narrative of past with that of the future. It’s not because, it’s rather therefore. Except that the therefore unfolds over time.
So, you see bud, the why is in the future. I happened in somebody’s life not owing to what transpired but what’s to come. And since you have a lot more agency in the future than in the past, you can make such events realize value in your own terms. When you fail in the exam, think not that you didn’t work hard enough, think that there’s something better in store for you. When a relationship expires, think not of what more you could have done to salvage it, but instead trust that the next one makes a better fit. Job transitions, financial losses, accidents, failed social contracts et al., all hint at making you learn a better skill, be a more evolved human. By blaming on your past actions, you resign to fate, but by anchoring it in the future, you embrace the event with courage. And isn’t everything anyways about mindset?
So go on, live light, and embrace the reality as it’s offered to you, with a determination that you will emerge better.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.