Everyday Miracles

I always wanted God to perform magic for me. Instant knowledge. Instant cure. Instant smiting. To recall a few prayers. The last one for my enemies.

Today I know better. I still want magic but I know enough to not expect it. I may have faith the size of a mountain but I doubt if it could allow me teleportation. So I leave the ultra-amazing to sci-fi and fantasy fic.

I implore for quiet miracles now. Not magic.

I’ve made karma my new religion. As you sow, so shall you reap. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. This thought has deeply affected how I have come to conduct myself. Tried to, at any rate.

I still believe in miracles but I no longer think God performs tricks and magic, bending the laws of nature, weaving illusions and defying logic. It is all just knowledge, I guess.

If we are to accept that God is the beginning and the end and everything in between, then foreknowledge is included in the package deal. So someone who already knows what can or what will happen can ensure a lot of things.

I liken it to a great many things we do in office. From experience and from the rule books, we know a bunch of stuff that can potentially happen. Which is why we methodically work to ensure that the negative is avoided and the positive encouraged. Most of us, that is. Take election, for example. Election rule books are heavy and detailed, accounting for almost all the things that can possibly go wrong. And it keeps giving you solutions to those problems. Should they occur. So when something out of the ordinary happens on Election Day and the officials readily know how to deal with it, it was not magic. Just preparation and foreknowledge.

The best thing I’ve learned about adult life is that nobody knows anything. We’re all just shuffling along, faffing and pretending we know shit. So it’s alright if you don’t know something either. Nobody really does. It is a huge burden lifted. All you have to do is the best you can and leave the rest to God. The Universe. You’ll be fine.

Someone who already knows the plans for you will have prepared the way for you. You just have to live a little on faith. Faith. How simple a concept and yet how complicated and intricate. And if you have a little, how much stress it can lift off of you.

In the end, I suppose the best thing we can do is just be kind and invest in good karma. None of us are islands. Every bit of support counts. And every bit of non-support also affects. We are never useless, unless we choose to think of ourselves thusly. We can be parts of quiet, everyday miracles.

And those are the best kinds.

On Kindness

Esau and Jacob were twins and yet one was loved and the other, meh. When not even twins in a biblical patriarch’s household can attest to having the same parents and upbringing growing up, I believe it is safe to assert that people live different lives than us. They have different experiences and we can’t possibly claim to fully understand all that they think or do. It is not an understatement to say you never know what someone is going through. So we should maybe ease up on the judging.

Easier said than done, though.

One time my cousin asked me to help him solve a Maths problem. This was lower level Maths so I helped him. I explained the steps and he kept understanding it, so I exclaimed: You already know it, why did you ask me?! My sister smacked me on the metaphorical head and snapped: You explained it to him and that’s how he understood it; he didn’t come to you having already understood it! I laughed because I felt stupid; once she said it out loud, it made sense.

It was basically a case of having all the numbers but not knowing how to add them up. A lesson I am still learning today, by the way. Sometimes you know all the variants to a situation and yet you just never put them together until it is too late. Or until God intervenes and pulls you out in a lowkey dramatic cowboy swerve. That’s when you think: hey, prayer works!

Another story for another time.

I understand how much my position of privilege has defined me, but I do not want to be limited by it. I want to be more, never less. I want to be kinder, nicer, more empathetic and wiser – a list of challenges that always feel Sisyphean because I seem to be very bad at it.

Sometimes I don’t know if I even try.

I think what I want as my default is to remember that people are different from me. They did not have parents, for example, who did not seem to think that learning to be independent was gendered as many parents seem to think. Yes, I missed out on many things many young ladies learnt from their homes but they also missed out on what I had. Who is to say who got it better or worse? Not me, for sure.

I want to remember that I cannot judge people from my own life experience. Of course, I shall judge them mercilessly and sometimes callously with my best friends but that should not bleed into Life Outside Of Idle Gossip. Very hard to remember to do, but this much I am trying.

I sign off this time with these words from Doctor Who: without hope, without witness, without reward, be kind.