The Ministry of Happiness

I believe in Karma. If the good is sown, the good is collected. When positive things are made, that returns well. ~ Yannick Noah

The Beauty of Karma

I am a big believer in Karma, honestly I consider it nothing more than physics. Newton’s third law, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and yes, for the scientists reading this, I absolutely do know I’m over simplifying. And to simplify they way I think about Karma even more, if you drop a stone into a calm body of water ripples extend in every direction, but they don’t go on forever. Once they hit the boundary of the puddle the waves rebound and come back to the source. So the way I see it, the actions that we take are the pebbles we drop into the pond. Karma is the rebound of the waves our actions have created returning to us. Those waves that return are similar to the waves that were sent. So send out waves of positivity and caring, and get that in return.

So before we continue let me be clear about something, I can be a complete bastard. I want to make that clear so that no one accuses me of breaking my arm patting my self on my back. I very much view myself as a mirror, I reflect back what I get. If you come at me with arrogance, anger and a lack of compassion, that’s exactly what you get back and you’ll get it with a whole lot of energy behind it, and I don’t feel bad about it. Like the edges of the puddle, I reflect the waves back at who made them. In my job, whenever I take a new position, I tell my people the same thing every time. We work in education, if the work you do and the actions you take show that you care about the welfare of students, we’ll get along great. If the actions you take show you don’t, we’ll have issues. The other thing I make a great effort to do in my job is to get to know and support my classified professional staff. In higher education there is often a hierarchical view of the people who work on a campus. Faculty are put on a pedestal, but the classified folks, the administrative assistants who run the world, the technicians, aides and custodians, all who are absolutely critical for the success of the institution and therefore the students, are often considered less than, because they are sometimes less educated. Being a blue collar kid and a first generation college student, that attitude angers me.

So I work hard to support my classified folks, one of the things I do in their evaluations is to ask them how I can be a better boss, and I also ask them how I can support whatever their next career move is going to be. I’m extremely proud of all of the classified professional staff over the years who have achieved their career goals with my support. This week those actions reflected back to me in a bunch of ways. First, as I discussed in my Rev’s Wild Ride post, a number of my staff are people who are offering to help me during my recovery after my upcoming open-heart surgery. The other thing that has happened is a number of folks, groundskeepers, maintenance staff and custodians have sought me out to ask about my surgery and how I’m doing. These folks are not people I supervise, they are just people who also work on campus who appreciate that I treat them with kindness and respect like they matter, because quite simply they do and I appreciate their contributions.

Often when we think about Karma we think about the bad actors and wonder when the wheel of Karma will turn and bring them the consequences they deserve. But I’ve learned something about Karma in my life, it always comes, but it comes on it’s own timeline and often not when we’d like to see it. But at times, like what I’ve been describing, sometimes those positive karmic waves come rolling back just when you need them, I’m seeing that right now and it quite simply has warmed my heart and been a nice reminder of how important and why it’s right to treat people with kindness and respect.

Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane