Karma Apples...

Have you ever wondered if Karma was real? or thought that maybe it's just some stoners way of describing things without really having to think beyond if you do this, this will happen. Thank you Pavlov. Today I witnessed two things that were ever so simple, but the impact they had on my thought process was profound.

I went to the grocery store today. A young mother with four children (who couldn't have been older than 6) entered right behind me. Feeling her frustration with her herd of children, I managed to be decent for a change and pushed a shopping cart over to her so that she would have one waiting after she finished chasing down one of her missing sheep. She said, "thank you" and so did all four of her little ones. Which impressed me, but what really caught my attention was that as I walked away one of them said, "Mommy, that was a nice man." It really made me feel good about myself.

But before this comes off as an effort to glorify myself I'll get to the karma portion... On the way out of the store, a package fell off of the bottom of my cart. As, I was riding the cart and acting quite childish myself, I didn't notice. But as I was putting my groceries into my truck. A young boy said, "Mister, this fell off of your cart." and he handed me my package.

Now, something so trivial would normally have gone unnoticed by me, but for whatever reason I couldn't help but think that the only reason my package was returned was because I gave a stressed mother a shopping cart. Obviously this isn't scientific proof that karma exists, but on my blog I accept all conjecture and hearsay as long as it isn't "because I said so".

The second occurrence was a bit later as I drove to the office. I'm in my truck enjoying my day, when rock strikes my windshield giving it a good two chips. DAMN IT!! But, I got my work out of the way and drove over to the auto glass shop to get it fixed. Free. Free? Free. Thank goodness for that. I called my auto-insurance carrier to double check I wasn't about to get hit by some unknown when they said that I had a $500 deductable... I didn't remember it being that high. But as of last week, I was due for a rate change. And so to lower my deductable to $100 it would only cost an extra $2 month. This isn't exactly a karma point, but it fits the theme of trivial being significant. I never would have called, had that rock not struck my window. But it turned out that that little bastard of a rock did me a huge favor.

There are so many times in my life that I just have let small things go by unnoticed. But somehow, in the past couple of weeks, I have not only begun to notice and appreciate the little things in life, but also begun to handle the bigger things with much less stress and complaint. Maybe I'm finally becoming an adult (gulp). Or I would like to think that because I have taken care to manage the little things in life, the big ones just come easier. It's so easy to just worry about myself, but there is definitely a sense of self-satisfaction when I have the opportunity to help somebody else. I'm beginning to strongly believe that the more good I do, the more good is returned. And the less I worry, and the more I let roll off of me, the better I can handle the bigger problems that arise. Obviously, this doesn't prove the existence of karma, but then again, you've probably got something better to do than read this blog anyway...