Wednesday, October 10, 2007
What do we deserve?
If life has taught me anything to this point, it is this: deserve has nothing to do with it. Spending a lot of time thinking about what we do and do not deserve is equivalent to spending a great deal of our time pondering the dirt under our fingernails, rather than continuing to claw our ways forward. Life does not give a shit about what we believe we do or do not deserve. The Universe knows no mercy, knows no favoritism, hell, it doesn’t even know tomorrow or yesterday. Our perceptions of these things are purely illusory means of establishing a conceivable order in something that is only ordered by its perpetual chaos. Life is constantly in flux. It begins, it ends, it peaks, it valleys, but it is not ever truly stagnant. As an experience, it is dynamic and fluid.
We put ourselves in danger when we ascribe human concepts like justice and fairness to the processes of Mother Nature. We become victims of ourselves when we begin believing in the idea that we deserve the suffering that we all inevitably face at one time or another in life. We deserve no such thing, just as we do not deserve life’s pleasures, trials, successes, failures, or tribulations. Entitlement is a slippery slope, everything in life must be worked toward. You can live your entire life justly, righteously, and honorably, yet still find yourself under the tires of a passing bus.
The Universe plays no favorites, no matter how much we would like to believe our hardships and successes are part of some grand scheme. Reality simply Is, meaning that the Universe can only be understood as a context for existence, not as a supernatural phenomena acting as a Sherpa on our journey up Mount Everest. Everything we tangibly experience during that climb is the result of a cognitive process, and is therefore tainted the by processing. The idea that we deserve anything is impossible under such circumstances.
Do any of us deserve a world of war, disease, greed, pestilence, and exploitation? How about a world of physical pleasure, ease, peace, and leisure? Such questions are in and of themselves irrelevant. This world is not about deserve, this world is where we are, this world is when we are, those are the only things we can claim to have any hope of experiencing as certainties. Everything else is a product of our ideas, assumptions, and perspectives. Even karma, a concept I am very fond of, is in reality a product of my limited, cerebral understanding and a deep desire for justice. Karma, fate, destiny, and similar explanations for chance’s rambling in our lives are almost certainly nothing more than products of the collective imagination.
A good man who has lived a gentle, positive life may still suffer the ravages of disease and die young, while a corrupt, immoral, malignant man might ascend to the highest levels of power and prestige, living a long and comfortable life. Is it karma? Is it Fate? Destiny? Maybe it’s God’s will? I find all of those possibilities to be unlikely, no matter how predisposed I may be to the idea of karma. By believing that we are anything except self-determined animals puts us at risk of being passengers in life. Thinking this way casts us in the role of actors in some mysterious, cosmic comedy. In my mind, existence is more substantial and full of potentialities.
I accept that there is an element of chance and risk in life. From the moment we are conceived to the moment we take our last breath, our existence is at risk. While concepts like deserve, destiny, fate, etc might bring an element of comfort to that persistent state of uncertainty, they are ultimately nothing more than coping mechanisms. We deserve what we think we deserve, our fates are the result of choices we make intersecting with others’ choices, and our interaction with random events. For better or worse, making choices and accepting risk is an integral part of accepting life. That said, I believe suffering or benefiting because of those choices and risks has nothing to do with “deserve”, at least so far as the natural world is concerned.
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