When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I have heard people ask of the universe or their imaginary sky being of choice, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”.  Bad things happen to everybody.  Just like good things happen to everybody.  Good things happen to bad people.  It’s called life.  Time would be better spent not pondering “Why?”, but plotting, “What next?”.

You can be sure if you leave a reasonable, crime and mayhem-free life that maybe you will suffer only the garden variety assortment of “bad things” – loss of a loved one, love relationship gone bad,  health crisis through accident or disease, dropping your mobile phone in the toilet or any number of mishaps that befall the majority of us.  Some of it is self-created.  For example, I am not very coordinated and am absent-minded.  I have a laundry list of lost items and injuries due to these personal shortcomings.  I occasionally make bad choices in my partners, again, based on my own personal deficiencies, conditioning, family life and other experiences that have shaped me.  I have tried to train myself via my fake Buddist practice to “choose” and not to “want”, because “want” is full of all of those things that come from your ID and your lizard brain doesn’t always know what’s best for you in this semi-civilized world.

Looking back on my life, especially prompted by the awesome scanning and digitization project I have taken on,  I feel like I have been alive a very long time.  It passes quickly, but there are many chapters, phases, turning points and paths in there.  Almost 50 years sounds like a long time, too.  Each phase is full of joy and sorrow, defeat and triumph, validation and disappointment.  I’ve made a few really big mistakes of my own choosing.  I can’t go back and fix them.  Nor would I.  I can only learn and plod forward, hoping not to wear the T-Shirt with the definition of insanity.

There is great pain, loss, suffering, misery, torture and anguish.  I have experienced some of the most base brutality a person can imagine.  None of this was my own doing or brought upon by my own actions.  I cannot say I brought any of it upon myself, especially when I was young.  The thing I remember most about those times was the feeling of helplessness, not being able to help yourself, get away, not having a protector, and basically having to deal with it because you are a kid and you have no money, autonomy, legal rights or just the credibility that anyone will listen to you.  You are bound and gagged, for the most part.  So, I’d say, yes, bad things happen to good people, or at least the innocent, before they have the chance to develop into either a good or bad person of majority.  I had my tarot cards read and the first card was a man on a bed of swords with a dark background.  The next card was another card with a dark background.  The reader could not understand the darkness, only seeing the light public persona who now barely makes her living in hospitality.  I have a lot of darkness in my background.  I live with darkness every day, but that’s not how I live.

I live in the light.  I’m extremely fortunate.  I do not use the word lucky.  I am not lucky.  I don’t win prizes from games of chance.  If anything, I have a dozen examples of which my luck is rotten with terrible results.  But, through some cosmic accident, I am fortunate.  I was born with all my parts and they work pretty well, and no major health issues that would prevent me from living into a ripe, old age.  I am not stupid and I am not ugly.  I have my parents to thank for that, but again, another accident of genetics, not of my own doing.  Some of the hardships in my life have had brilliant results – made me strong emotionally and physically and able to put “the small stuff” in perspective.  I have other native gifts, along with lessons from my family and experiences that have borne fruit though my hard work.  The fancy education my parents bought me along with the way my brain works has given my the ability to accurately express my feelings through words – and I don’t mince them, either. 

I feel like I can use this particular combination of gift and skill to help others, who may have difficulty coping with life’s hardships and being stuck in the “Why”.  I started a book about all of the obstacles, challenges, personal tragedies and losses I have been through in the hopes that someone would laugh in recognition, be entertained or maybe even see themselves and see there is a way through anything you can face.  As an example of my clumsiness and “bad luck”, I finished 15 half-page summaries of each chapter which took a lot of work.  I had an outline.  I was sharing it with a friend, opened the document and cut and pasted the contents into an email.  So I thought.  I went back to the outline, and had only a chapter and a half.  Where did all my work go?  I thought, good thing I emailed it!  I went to the email, and that’s all that was there – a paragraph and a few sentences.  I must have hit “backspace” instead of return and saved the deleted version.  I could not face for the longest time this loss – the loss about loss. 

I have to get back to work.  I don’t have another 50 years.  I have had another spell of loss and am recently regaining the energy to channel my energy into creating something.  I started writing the outline for the book, as I saw myself in a position of strength, skating through that point of my life, figuring that I probably had seen all the personal tragedy of several lifetimes and things were calming down.  I was settling into suburbia in a town where nothing bad happens except a really big college party and some natural disasters.  Then I lost the outline.  Then I lost that life I spent years making for myself. After a short spell of self pity, I had to figure out - what next?

One of the cruel ironies of the accident of my birth is that I look really good to other people from the outside, but the inside is a rocky place where no seed can find purchase.  I will never contribute to the perpetuation of the species.  I can create something that might enlighten and entertain, as I did with music.  There will be something left here on earth when I am not, which might last longer than another human.  I don’t think I’m here to reproduce.  I am here to produce.  Sometimes the only thing I have to get me through is my wits.  I need to use them while I still can.  They may only have a few decades of usefulness left.  It’s not a bad thing, either.  It’s a different kind of biological clock.  One that says, get to work and prove you were here.  Make something good, or even useful, out of all the bad.  Maybe you’ll even make a little bit of money, too.  Dying of old age is never a bad thing.  Just like the good and the bad, everybody dies.  The ones who can make the best of it while we inhabit a body and maybe even make it better for others will be there real victors of this evolutionary shitshow.  Death will happen.  And that’s not one of the bad things, if I can make it to old age.  If I don’t, then that’s a story for someone else to tell.  I'm wondering, "What next?".