And Justice For All (April 2005)

…And Justice for All

You know the clichés: What goes around, comes around. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You reap what you sow. Enough? Let’s see their relevance in this story.
“Ten years,” my friend heaved with a sigh. “Ten years and now he won’t even look at me!”
Wait, a little background first: a couple dating exclusively since the mid-90s. Ten years of togetherness. How could it not be love? They traveled together, they shared dreams of the future, had the same expectations, enjoyed each other’s company… so what happened?
They fought. He said something nasty, she said something nastier back (gentlemen, in terms of verbal poison, the woman almost always has more venom.) He slammed the phone down and never bothered to pick it up again, despite her frantic attempts to patch things up. A week later, she spots him having dinner with new girl in tow. She approaches them in greeting (or shock.) He glances her way, and then makes a huge, obvious effort to glance away.
Ouch. Sound familiar? Could you have been a cast member in a similar scenario? I tried consoling my friend as I too was in shock, but more questions kept bubbling up in my head. I bit my tongue lest they come out. Thankfully, through inexplicable female mind reading, she started verbalizing what I had wanted to ask.
The questions flew out in a stream: You think he was already seeing her prior to the fight? Why had he said such a nasty thing to me to begin with? Why did he look the other way? Why did he ignore me?
I didn’t have any answers for her, but I was getting upset. Even though I didn’t want to add more emotion to this already charged situation, I opened my mouth and came out with probably the dumbest thing I could have said, another cliché: “Cheer up, it’s not the end of the world.”
I cringed the moment the words left my lips and I was sure it did nothing to console her. What I really wanted to say was “He ignored you because he’s a dickhead and should have the living shit kicked out of him”. Maybe it was one too many mafia-oriented shows in my DVD collection, but I was suddenly channeling Tony Soprano. Through my friend’s hurt and confusion, I could only see red.
That night, after desperately trying to stop my friend from drowning her sorrow in dessert (as she would later come to regret it) I wondered what I could possibly do to get her ex to come to his senses --- or at least impart a little “revenge” along the way. Though sorely tempted to construct a makeshift voodoo doll in his image, I decided instead to turn to the law. No, not vigilante law a la Dog, the Bounty Hunter (who by the way needs some serious sunblock) or via a lawsuit, but something more universal: the law of karma.
In Buddhist teaching, the law of karma says only this: `for every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful.'
A skillful event is one that is not accompanied by craving, resistance or delusions; an unskillful event is one that is accompanied by any one of those things. Just replace skillful with positive and unskillful with negative, so, if you bring joy into one’s life, you get joy back, and if you bring hurt and pain …well, it’s self-explanatory.
Basically, whatever was going to teach him a lesson had already been set into motion. I know that I will probably never uncover the truth of what triggered my friend’s ex to treat her so callously. I am also aware that the last fight was probably a build-up of old tensions that had gone on for far too long. I also know this: that in any relationship, truth and sincerity have to prevail.
Folks, if there are problems in your relationship you have to bring them up, because your partner is not a mind reader. And should you have attempted to fix things and decided that it is indeed time to move on, the first one who should know is the one person you once said you would love forever and would never want to hurt. Whether or not you believe in karma, you would have at least been fair.
To quote from a CSI episode “The best defense is an honest life”. When you lie, cheat, lash out to hurt, you can be pretty much guaranteed that there’s going to be a snowball of those emotions coming your way.
And for those who have been on the receiving end, and cling to the notion of “Right girl, wrong time”, let me give you my own cliché: “Right girl, wrong time, is STILL the wrong girl.”
A week later my friend and I met up for lunch. She looked fine, even if there was still some hurt, but I had no doubt in my mind that she would be alright. The bloodthirst for revenge on my part had lessened seeing that the pain had in fact helped her move on. As she eyed some chocolate cake in the dessert tray, I was confident that one day she would indeed, have her just desserts. Hare Om.