I continue to improve after the depths of post-chemo side effects, which leaves me with the energy for the following philosophical musings.
In The Sound of Music, Maria (played by Julie Andrews) sings that "somewhere in my youth—or childhood—I must have done something good." She feels that she must have done something to earn her current happiness with Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer). "Nothing comes from nothing," she sings. It's a sweet song, but a dangerous philosophy.
Somewhere in my youth—or childhood—I must have inhaled some asbestos. The fibers settled deep in my right lung and gradually sank down, like some sort of evil mud monster, into the lung's lining (the pleura), where they irritated and irritated and irritated the tissues until finally, some forty years or so later, the tissues turned cancerous.
That's what caused this. I didn't kick kittens or drown puppies or even dig up a cursed mummy. I simply inhaled. Like we all do, every day.
There are villains in this story (and I may get to them in a later post), but I am not one of them. I reject unequivocally the Sound of Music notion that we earn our good and bad luck. Some things we earn, yes. There are consequences to bad choices and bad behavior. But other things just... happen.
So I am not asking, "What did I do to deserve this?"
And you, my dear friends out there, shouldn't ask that about your bad luck either.
Because the answer is simple: nothing.
A rejection of the concept of 'karma,' or at least the Western understanding of it. Frankly, I agree.
ReplyDeleteLots of people who were acquainted with our friend Ivy when she was diagnosed with lung cancer years ago immediately assumed she was a smoker. Not only had she never been a smoker but she had no known risk factors, as far as I'm aware. The urge to blame the victim seems to be a widespread phenomenon, perhaps stemming from the unfounded belief that if we can just avoid making mistakes we can insulate ourselves from misfortune.
ReplyDeleteI really want to hear about those villains. And is it definitively asbestos? Or is that the most common cause? I of course concur with the idea that we don't cause all bad things to happen to us (though there are definitely those who believe so), but I still really prefer to understand why things (good and bad) happen in general. I know things can be random and the "enemy always gets a vote," but I still struggle to understand causes. Even something random had a cause ("For want of a nail, the shoe was lost..."), but unfortuantely, we can't always see the trajectory.
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