Randem Tandem

Tom’s Thoughts

Well, let me just start by saying that I’m not going to dispute everything Brandy just said.
Take that, my darling! Neh! (sticks out tongue like a belligerent child)

However, I will start by calling that not only hippy-dippy spiritualist hokum, but also poppycock and malarkey.
That’s right, malarkey too, bitches.

While I’m absolutely positive that the world isn’t going to end because of the Mayan Calendar, I’m still slightly terrified of zombies, most especially at night just before I fall asleep, and I’m not entirely convinced that we aren’t secretly or not so secretly riding the apocalypse train to oblivion.

Chugga-Chugga-Kaboom-Boom!

The fact is that every action, including the production of words from our mouths, produces results, or, if you prefer, every cause has an effect, usually many, many effects that we cannot even begin to imagine when we perform our causes.

And, what’s more, each thing we do causes other things to be done, rippling through society from person to person and ultimately coming back to us in some way in an endless loop of action.

This is what I think more spiritual people than myself would call Energy, or Karma, or Chi, or Ki, or the Gods, or whatever the flying fuck.

(Incidentally, I happen to belong to the Church of The Flying Fuck. It’s an offshoot of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

(Actually, not really. If anything I’m an old-school Odinist. Go Odin.)

So, wake up later than you expected because you snoozed your alarm and be snippy with your wife and kids on your way out the door. They go off a little bit more angry at the world, so they’re snippy with everyone they see. This snippiness ripples on and on throughout a crap-load of people until it reaches the barista at the coffee shop where you stop that afternoon. She’s a total bitch to you, just stares and demands your money. Thus your anger has looped back on yourself. Meanwhile, your wife stops at the post office to mail something and is short with the guy behind the counter. He’s been holding in five years of rage and will continue to hold another fifteen until he finally blows up, shows up with an AK, and shoots up the joint.

These are just closed-system loops between a limited number of people, but in practice it works pretty much the same except there tends to be a lot more people to go through.

It’s all just causes and effects.
Whatever people put into the world, whether through their actions or their words, tends to go out into the world and cause others to put the same into the world.

So, if someone dumps toxic waste into the ocean and gets away with it, you can be sure every other schmuck with a warehouse full of waste is going to do the same damn thing.

Pretty simple, really.

Now for the expectation thing, that’s a little more complex but follows the same rules, kinda.

It just tends to be a lot more internal.

It is true that what you expect is what you tend to get, and that seems to be mostly because what you expect is what you tend to look for.

If you think there’s no chance you’re ever going to get your big break then you’re not going to work all that hard to get there.

You might feel like you’re working pretty fucking hard, but you’re not going to be doing as much with your hours every day as you might have if you honestly thought you were going to make it.

And, you’re going to overlook genuine opportunities because you aren’t looking for them, because you’re so preoccupied thinking about how you’re not going to make it and how pointless it is.

So, maybe you play your guitar on the street instead of hitting the open mic nights.

Maybe you jam in your garage instead of filling out the paperwork to use your local public bandstand for a small concert.

Maybe you rely on a Facebook page you only told your parents about for publicity instead of telling every motherfucker you meet about your mad skills.

Maybe you accidentally don’t overhear the record executive ahead of you at the Starbucks bitching that he just can’t find enough new talent because you’re too busy hanging out in your own head and dwelling on how much it sucks not to have made it yet.

Maybe you just say “fuck it,” chuck the whole thing, and spend the last month of your unemployment watching Battlestar Galactica on Netflix and then go get a job.

But, what happens if you have that “positive attitude” all the hippy-dippies are always preaching to you about?

Excitement happens.

You wake up every morning certain you’re gonna make it, and you do every last goddamned thing you can to make it happen.

You put down the remote and get the fuck out there every day and do what you love, what you’re best at, and you succeed.

Well, maybe and maybe not.
Life’s still a crapshoot at best.

But, people who try get a lot farther than people who don’t, and the greatest difference between people who don’t try and people who do is that one is certain that they will fail and the other is certain that they won’t.

It’s been described by the Hindus (or Hindoos if you’re a 19th century British man) as the law of reincarnation, finding yourself in one life after another, better or worse based on what you did.

It’s been described by the Buddhists as Karma, the force of action and thought that binds the universe together.

It’s been described by millennia of Asian mysticism as Chi or Ki (basically the same thing, by the way), the energy that binds life.

It’s been described by the new-agers as “energy,” a generic term for the old idea of pretty much all of the above.

It was described in painful length in the short book “As a Man Thinketh.”
Seriously, not worth the read enough that I ever finished the damn thing.

It was even described by Joss Whedon’s Malcolm Reynold’s words “Wheel never stops turning” in Firefly.

Over and over, time and time again, the simple truth behind cause and effect within human systems has been explained to us, and for whatever reason we just keep missing the point.

So, yeah, the world might end, or just get so unbelievably frakked up that our lives are constant and unending misery compared to what they are now.

Or the future may be some glorious paradise of electric everything powered by unending free, renewable, clean energy in which monetary systems have been abolished, everyone gets what they want and need because there’s way more than enough to go around, pollution is entirely repaired, and everyone can think, say, and do whatever they want whenever they want.

Or it might be something in-between.

But, no matter what it is, it will be entirely of our own making.

Not the government’s making, or the politicians’ making, or the CEOs’ making, or fortune 500 companies’ making, or some religion’s making, or some foreign countries’ making, or your parents’ generation’s making, or your childrens’ generation’s making, but your making.

The destiny of all of us is in your hands and our hands, right now, today, and every day.

Cause your effects.