We’re layered backward in time. Choices made last night, last year, or ten years ago braid us together toward the exact moment, the exact place we now find ourselves.
It’s harder for me to think about it as karma–every action accreting consequences–than it is more to think about it as kismat. Kismat is “fate,” but only in a sense. It’s a fate that’s governed by a myriad, million different actions and reactions throughout the universe, throughout time.
To think about it simply: my body’s exhaustion now is the product of perhaps not eating quite enough this morning. Whatever calories and vitamins I ingested at 5:00am interacted in all kinds of chemical processes throughout my body that have affected my mood, my energy level, my ability to perceive the world around me.
Yet I am not solely governed by physical fate, am I? There is a yoga class at 7pm. I really want to go to it. I’ll go if I don’t manage to talk myself out of it.
Also this afternoon for the first time (I am sure not the last), I felt sad. I wanted the fast to be over, so I could just make a cup of coffee, go into my writing room and work. Also classes start next week; how will I manage?
I wander around the house, distracted, unable to fix myself to any one thing. I am slow on the uptake, have communication difficulties with everyone. I chose the fast for myself but dozens of people around me are affected by how I interact with them.
We hope that we only exert positive energies on others. Kismat after all cuts both ways: our fates are woven, but we are one out a multiple million weavers each separate for a million (billion? more?) other beings.
The refractions of our actions through space and time are literally endless.
It’s a physical practice of course. If my mind cannot fix on the tasks that need to be completed–syllabi to be finalized, a manuscript of essays due to the publisher on August 31–at least my body can concentrate.
Be told to breathe.
In the late afternoon of the sixth day of the fast I dreamed it to be over. But I’m not yet even through a quarter of the month, not yet through even one phase of the moon.