Sometimes, Karma Is Your Best Friend

The old saying is “what goes around comes around”. It holds true to this day and many more to come. Karma is a universal truth and everyone received that dish served cold, including me at one point or more in time. I had my share of karma coming back to haunt me. I also witnessed many instances when karma came back to haunt the people who have done injustices to me personally. However, there is one experience that gave me the best example of how karma and the universe works. 

Let’s time travel to Columbus Park in 2007 in Hackensack, New Jersey when it was a blistering hot summer day. At the time, I’m 13 years old and I’m in a sports camp where kids played a variety of sports and went on weekly field trips. For this day specifically, this was not a field trip day. The heat was so unbearable that Satan himself will need to cool down. So, the camp counselors decided to go into the recreation center that was a couple of blocks away from the park that we were playing in.

Once we arrived at the recreation center, we were welcomed with a relieving cool breeze from the air conditioning in the building. Everyone was free from the tense suffocating humidity and they ran into the gymnasium to enjoy the rest of the afternoon. The camp counselors directed us to separate ourselves into groups since the gym was big enough for four activities. The following activities were basketball, jump rope, wall ball, and playing with a couple of dodgeballs to bounce and shoot around. 

So, every kid went to their desired activities after the activities were established. As for me, I started playing three half-court basketball games, then I started to play wall ball after I was drained from basketball. Wall ball is a game where five to ten people can play. The person must throw a tennis ball on the wall and someone has to catch it. If they don’t, they have to run the wall before they get pegged by the ball. If they get pegged by the person before they get to the wall, the person must standstill on the wall with their back turned while the other person pegs them with the ball as hard as possible. Yeah, we were young and dumb.

After that, I took a break from the activities and I sat on the stage to eat my snack to take a chill pill eating my orange and Chips Ahoy cookies. I was just observing the kids play in harmony and all of a sudden, BAM! Someone threw a dodgeball and blindsided me out of nowhere. The force was so hard that the cookie in my mouth flew out and it felt like a hard slap on my right cheek. I looked in the direction of where the ball came from and I found the bully that threw it and he was in tears of laughter. The fact that he was laughing to the point where he was getting an ab workout was making my anger boil up beyond its point. 

So I tossed my Chips Ahoy to the side and started chasing him around the whole gym. I tried to hit him with the same ball that he hit me with. I wanted to hit him square in the face to the point where his nose broke. I was lusting after his blood and suffering. So, I chased him around the jump rope section, the wall ball section, and the dodgeball area. The camp counselors assumed that we were chasing each other being playful, so they didn’t bother us at that time.  

When I chased him around the basketball area, there were a lot of basketballs being shot and missed and made around the section. But one of the campers missed a shot and bounced off the backboard, the bully was still running away from me and the missed ball flew towards him and hit him square in the face. When I tell you that I was laughing so hard that my cheeks were hurting, my vengeful anger dispelled to a laughing spell. I dropped the ball and I went back eating my Chips Ahoy.

That was when I realized that there are forces out in the universe that will sometimes work in your favor. There are going to be times when karma will be in your favor. They say karma can be a bitch, but I disagree. Karma is a bitch only when you are.