Am I Bad Luck? Or Am I Just Bad?

“Am I bad luck? Or am I just bad?” In my thirty years as a monk and traveling speaker, I don’t think I had ever heard a question more heartbreaking. It came from an eight-year-old girl, a slender little thing with short black hair and big solemn eyes. I was staying for almost a week at the home of a devotee who was hosting me during a speaking tour in America. There were two girls in the house, and I initially assumed that they were sisters. The older one seemed noticeably quieter and more reserved. Later, my host told me the horrifying story. She was actually his niece. Her parents had died in a fire, and with no one else to care for her, she had come to stay with her uncle and his family. She was an Indian girl born in America after her parents had migrated there. Since childhood, she had had her own room, but she and her mother had been very close. Her mother would sometimes come to her room, cuddle her, and sleep beside her. On one fateful evening, the girl had insisted on getting a new doll. Her mother had said no. Upset and angry, the girl had refused to let her mother sleep beside her that night. Her mother had therefore gone to the master bedroom. That very night, a fire mysteriously broke out there. Smoke was seen billowing from the house. The fire alarms went off, and a neighbor called the fire department. The girl was rescued. For her parents, it was too late. Now she was living with her uncle. During the days I stayed there, I gradually got to know her. She had a fondness for language and had read and watched stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. I began playing word games with her based on those stories. We started with the word sad. She made a sentence: “Ram felt very sad when Bharat told him that Dasharatha had died.” From there, we moved on to other words, taking turns making sentences from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. After we had played for some time, she suddenly looked up at me and asked: “Am I bad luck? Or am I just bad?” “You are neither,” I told her. “You are a sweet little girl who has been hurt terribly by life. Why would you think you are bad luck or bad?” “My mother told me that we should never go to sleep when we are angry with each other,” she said. “If we had a fight, we should talk and forgive each other before we slept. Otherwise, it was bad luck. “But that night I wanted the doll so badly. When my mother said no, I was so angry that I didn’t even say good night to her. I didn’t let her hug me. I knew it was bad luck, but I still did it. “That’s why I am a bad girl. That’s why the fire happened.” I told her gently that the fire was an accident. It had nothing to do with her quarrel with her mother. She didn’t look convinced. I prayed for guidance. How could I unburden the heart of this little child who had known far more pain than any child should have to know—and who was still carrying that pain? I gently touched my crutches, which were resting against the sofa near me. “You know why I need these?” She nodded solemnly. When I had first arrived, she had stared at my crutches and asked about them. I had briefly explained that I had contracted a disease called polio when I was very young. “But I didn’t tell you how I got polio.” She listened. “When I was a baby, my mother took me to get a medicine that was meant to stop me from getting a disease. That kind of medicine is called a vaccine.” At the word vaccine, she nodded. “But there was something wrong with that vaccine. Instead of stopping the polio, it caused the disease.” Her expression became even glummer. “I am not telling you this to make you feel worse,” I said. “I want to tell you what happened to my mother afterward.” When Guilt Imprisons Us in the Past “Just as your mother loved you very much, my mother loved me very much too,” I told her softly. “And just as you are feeling that something you did caused what happened to her, my mother felt that something she did caused what happened to me.” Only recently had I learned this part of my own story. One of my maternal aunts, my mother’s sister who had been very close to her, had heard a podcast in which I spoke about how I got polio. When I later happened to meet her, she told me how deeply my mother had suffered afterward. Now, sitting with this heartbroken little girl, I found myself sharing that story with her. “My mother kept thinking: Why did I take him to that doctor? Why didn’t I wait for his father to return? She felt so sad and guilty that one day, when I started crying because I was hungry, she didn’t even notice. A neighbor who heard me crying came to our window and called out, ‘Your baby is crying! What is the matter?’ “That neighbor’s voice brought my mother back. She looked at me and realized: I am feeling so bad about what happened to my baby that I am not taking care of the baby who is right here and still needs me. From that time, she decided that whatever had happened, she would simply be the best mother to me that she could possibly be.” I smiled at the little girl. “And she was the best mother for me.” She was listening intently now. “If your mother were here, would she want you to keep feeling sad and blaming yourself?” She shook her head. “Would she want you to be happy?” She nodded. “Then you can be the best little daughter for your mother. You can try to be the happy, bright girl she would have wanted you to be. If she knew that you were blaming yourself and remaining sad because of what happened, would she want that?” “No.” “And now you have an uncle who loves you very much. You have an aunt who cares for you. And you have a cousin for whom you can be the big sister.” She nodded. Her face did not suddenly brighten on hearing my words, but the tight, tense look she had carried seemed to soften a little. I didn’t know how much of what I had said had reached her. A wound that deep could hardly disappear through one conversation. But I hoped that perhaps another possibility had entered her mind: the fire did not have to mean what she had thought it meant. The Meanings Our Minds Make Later, while journaling about our conversation, I kept thinking about the meaning her little mind had made out of what had happened. We all search for meaning. We don’t merely experience what happens; we try to understand why it happened and what it means. That search has taken human beings toward science, literature, philosophy, and ultimately spirituality. But our search for meaning can also become a manufacture of meaning. When something mystifying or maddening happens, the mind doesn’t like leaving the question unanswered. It connects events, constructs explanations, and tells us why things happened. Sometimes those explanations may be insightful; sometimes they may be both untrue and unbearable. That little girl had connected two events: I quarreled with my mother and refused to reconcile with her; that night my parents died. From those two events, she had manufactured a meaning: I caused it. I bring bad luck. I am bad. The tragedy had already wounded her terribly. The meaning she had given the tragedy was wounding her further. I thought of the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna can make no sense of what he is being called to do. His responsibility as a warrior requires him to fight against people he loves and reveres, including his grandfather and his teacher. Even if he wins the kingdom, he fears that whatever enjoyment follows will be rudhira-pradigdhān—stained with blood. Neither what is happening to him nor what he is supposed to do makes sense to him. His responsibility to fight makes no sense; more fundamentally, even his role as a warrior seems to make no sense. In Bhagavad Gita 1.30, he says, nimittāni ca paśyāmi viparītāni—he sees adverse omens everywhere. His inability to make sense of his situation confuses him, cripples him, and crushes him. Krishna doesn’t merely tell Arjuna, “Don’t think like that.” Through the Gita, he patiently helps Arjuna reconstruct the framework through which he is viewing his situation. The Gita takes him through an elaborate ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual analysis until he can understand his situation in a way that strengthens him enough to move forward. An eight-year-old child could hardly be expected to understand that analysis. But it struck me that perhaps my purpose as a student and teacher of the Gita was not simply to recite its verses or repeat its philosophy. In my own small way, I needed to try to replicate the purpose that the Gita had served for its original student. Just as Krishna helped Arjuna make sense of a situation that had become senseless to him, perhaps I had tried to help this little girl make sense of what had happened—or, before she could make sense of it, at least to unmake the terrible sense her mind had already made. Enough Meaning to Move On As I reflected further on the story I had told her, I thought again about my own mother. After resolving to be the best mother she could be, she gradually found another way of looking at my disability. While talking with a relative who was consoling her, she once said, almost in passing, “Whatever he lacks physically, God will provide him intellectually.” Those words shaped my understanding of myself. They helped me focus not on what I lacked physically but on developing the intellectual gifts I had been given. Eventually, that same desire to understand—to make sense of myself, of life, and of the world—brought me to the Bhagavad Gita. Yet even with the wisdom of the Gita, there are still many pieces of life’s jigsaw puzzle that I cannot place. As a finite and fallible human being, I have had to accept that sometimes “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Still, I felt profoundly grateful that I had usually been able to make enough sense of life to move on with life—without becoming stuck, or worse, struck down by some false and crippling meaning my mind had manufactured. And then my thoughts returned to the little girl’s question. Am I bad luck? Or am I just bad? No and no. That is what I would now want to say emphatically to anyone, child or adult, whose mind had burdened them with such a conclusion. We are not bad. The Bhagavad Gita (15.7) explains that we are eternally parts of the Divine. Whatever mistakes we may make and whatever conditioning may cover us, at our core we are pure souls, eternal parts of the all-good Lord. And we are not bad luck. The source of all good fortune, the Lord, accompanies us within as the Paramatma, guiding us from within and drawing us toward him through all the ups and downs of our journey through life. As I looked back at my own life, I could see mistakes I had made and occasions when others had misled me or circumstances had hurt me. I could see many things I still could not explain. Yet I felt profoundly grateful that my mind had never made such a terrible meaning out of those events that I became stuck in them—or struck down by the meaning I had imposed upon them. With that gratitude in my heart, I offered a prayer: My dear Lord, thank you for protecting me, on more occasions than I can know, from the meaninglessness that life’s events can thrust upon me—and, perhaps even more, from the misleading meanings my own mind may manufacture about those events. When I cannot understand why something has happened, please help me not burden myself with meanings that are neither true nor helpful. Help me find enough meaning to move on with my life toward you, the source and shelter of all meaning. *** 15.07 The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind. The post Am I Bad Luck? Or Am I Just Bad? first appeared on Chaitanya Charan Das, Bhagavad Gita ISKCON .