I’ve seen this signboard all over the internet. My first reaction is, ouch. I’ve made my share of stupid decisions and paid the price.
A couple posts ago I told the Zen Master story, and I encourage you to read it again. The point of that story is that good things lead to bad things and bad things lead to good things, so it’s hard to sort out choices and consequences. We should wait with Zen-like patience before jumping to conclusions.
As I said in the previous post, there are several important angles on the Zen Master story, and I described my first angle: bad things can lead to good things, so we should hope for good even when things look bad.
The angle in this post, however, is tougher to stomach, because it’s about bad things leading to other bad things. While we keep our hope that good can come out of bad, we must also remember the more prevalent principle that bad begets more bad. We reap what we sow. If we plant bad seeds, we get bad crops. Bad choices almost always lead to bad consequences.
It’s generally stupid to make bad choices, suffer the consequences, and chalk it up to the forces of the universe. “Everything happens for a reason,” we imagine, as if our choices didn’t matter. This line of reasoning comforts us because it puts responsibility elsewhere, but it has a downside of keeping us in our stupidity. We can’t take lessons to heart, therefore we can’t learn from them and change our choices. So we continue to make bad choices and reap bad harvests, chalking it up to unchanging cosmic forces.
It’s sobering to take responsibility for bad choices and the consequences they create.
But it’s also liberating. As soon as we see ourselves planting the bad seeds, we can stop, and start planting better ones. We can change the outcomes when we change our choices.