CHANCE OR CHOICE

CHANCE OR CHOICE

CHANCE OR CHOICE?
Or the Law of Karma

A couple of years ago I was driving home from shopping through a small village not far from my village. I was at a cross road of three roads. To the right a road went to the house of a friend of mine, whom I was planning to see soon, straight on a road went to a shopping center where I also had planned to go soon, and left went to my home. I was tired and chose to go home.

I had just turned the corner and was behind a car which was driving very slow. At that moment a car came up behind me at quite a speed with a lady at the wheel looking at her cell phone, which she held in her hand. I KNEW she was going to hit me, not looking at the road, and she did.

She hit me from the back, and I, in my turn, hit the car in front of me. I broke my sternum, the lady in front of me had a whip lash, and the cause of all this chaos had nothing. Police, ambulances and eight hours of waiting in the emergency room before they took a lot of Xrays of me.

We of course blamed the third lady, and hoped that the police would take her driving licence away.

In the days and weeks that followed, I had a haunting question in my mind. WHY?

Why had I chosen the third road, the one that should take me home?

Was the third lady really the ‘culprit’? Sure, she had not looked at the road but at her cell phone.

OR HAD I CHOSEN THAT ROAD AND THAT LADY at some level of my being?

Was there a secret ‘contract’ between the three women to meet at that point in time and space to create this mess?

That question has even since been with me.

Is life, the things that happen to us, random chances, or CHOICES at some level, deep down in our sub or un-conscious? ARE WE THE CAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENS TO US?

A couple of years later I broke six vertebrae in my back. The doctors said it was osteoporosis.

To me it sounded again like something that I HAD DONE TO MYSELF.

Somewhere, deep inside myself, I had ‘punished’ myself for something, or some things, that I had done in the past.

Since then, I have thought a lot about this whole thing of all the rubbish stored somewhere deep inside all of us, what Jung called the ‘shadow side’, the dark side. Anger, resentment, depression, all the unresolved issues that clog the unconscious, that we are not aware of in normal life, but sooner or later raise its ugly head. In the Indian culture it is called karma