For years, I watched people respond to difficulty with a particular kind of resignation.
“It must be my karma,” they would say. Usually with a sigh. Usually with a burdened feeling that they were being punished — for something done in this life or a previous one, something they could neither identify nor undo.
I understood this feeling. I had felt it myself. But I gradually came to believe that this understanding of karma — as a ledger of rewards and punishments misses something essential about what this ancient wisdom is actually pointing toward.
Here is the way I have come to understand it.
Imagine life as a school. Not a school you chose, but one you were enrolled in long before you arrived like how parents enroll their child. In this school, there is a syllabus — a set of subjects assigned to you. Some of the subjects are easy and some feel tough. Some you like from the first page; others you resist until the very last moment before the exam.
But here is the thing about this school: you cannot skip a subject.
You can try. Many of us do. We avoid the lesson, distract ourselves from the difficulty, and hope the syllabus will be rearranged on our behalf. But there is a teacher in this school — patient and unhurried — who will simply place the book in front of you again. And again. Until you sit with it and learn what you are supposed to learn.
This IS karma. Not reward or punishment. Simply — the curriculum.
The suffering we experience is not because life is cruel or because we are being made to pay. It is because we are being asked to learn something we have not yet learned. And when the lesson is approached with that understanding — not with fear or resignation, but with the honest curiosity of a student — everything changes.
The book does not become easier. But our relationship with it does.
We stop asking why is this happening to me and begin asking what is this teaching me? And that single shift — from victim to student — changes not the facts of our life, but the entire experience of living it.
