When the victor becomes the vanquished.

Here’s one example: I broke someone’s heart, and then the next thing I knew, my heart was broken by somebody else. How exactly do you call that? Karma, the cause-and-effect law, or a simple “shit happens”?

What is karma anyway? According to people who believe in it, it’s a sort of divine consequences that you get after you did something, good or bad. Sometimes it is inexplicable, and can only be defined when connected to spiritual or God-oriented believes. The main idea of karma is, whenever you do something, the value of your decision will eventually return to you.

The thing is, every time I think about karma, my mind would drift away and look for other answers. More logical, unholy answers, like the cause-and-effect law and the “shit happens” law.

Example of the cause-and-effect law: When you recklessly throw a ball to the wall with enormous strength, the ball might bounce back and hit you on the face, break your nose, leaving you absent for school for a few days, thus failing you in Biology because it was the last week of essay submissions. One small event linked to another, swelling into bigger ones. How is that any different to: When you play around with other people’s trust, they might not trust you anymore, leaving you socially awkward and depressed because nobody’s putting their faith in you ever again. Some people might call that karma, but couldn’t that theory be formulated in the beginning with a little something called common sense? Of course when you betray people, they won’t trust you anymore. Of course when you rob a bank, there’s a chance of you getting caught and thrown into jail. In this case, karma is like an overrated form of cause-and-effect law in which logical explanation is not needed, but moral significance is.

Moral significance because, maybe it was made up in purpose to prevent people from behaving badly in life. Like, “Never disrespect other people, otherwise you’ll suffer under the punishments of karma”. You know, just because “Respect others to get yourself respected” wouldn’t sound convincing enough...

But personally I’d prefer this theory better: SHIT HAPPENS. If the law of karma really applies, how come not all corruptors on earth are behind bars right now, but instead might be luxuriating around the Pacific islands somewhere with their looted money? If the law of karma really applies, how come people who are good and wise and just right, sometimes suffer more hardship in life than people who are bad and unwise and just wrong? You can’t predict the future, so if you randomly throw a rock to a moving train, there’s a chance it might kill somebody. If it did, because apparently a frail old man already expecting Death to come soon was leaning his head against the window, then all you can say is “Oops, shit happens”. But if that did not happen and no police came to arrest you, then you can consider yourself lucky for naively escaping your own karma. Life is not fair, because shit happens. The law of karma might or might not occur to you, depending on the situation and condition and any luck-factor that took place, in other words the shit that chose to happen or not to happen at that very exact moment.

So yeah, my point is: Karma is merely a fabricated warning to get ourselves back on the path of righteousness, and shit never ceased to happen.

--> Movie recommendation: Match Point. A good example of how the law of karma gets defected under a mere, ridiculous coincidence.