Life Is Not a Straight Line

Curvy Road in Autumn

Our current culture, especially in America, believes in a firmly established causation system for rewards. Hard work brings riches. Faith brings prosperity and safety. Being a good person brings rewards. Eating less (or more) of something will improve your health. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing in the converse of these things. If you are poor you must be lazy. If you are depressed you just need more faith or more good thoughts. If you’re sick it must be because of the way you live or the way you eat. Life just isn't that way.

This thinking is not only wrong for us and can cause us to have obsessive behavior patterns and beliefs, but it is damaging to others and to society as a whole. It leads to the "I worked hard for this, and no one helped me so I'm not sharing and don't ask me to" beliefs. It leads to tribalism and racism. It leads to a believe of superiority and hatred of those "lazy others." It is playing out right now in the populist political movements across the western world and especially here in America. The fiction writer, Walter Mosely, put it this way in his book "Known To Evil":

"AMERICANS BELIEVE IN STRAIGHT lines. They think that all you have to do is get out there and get the job done, one step after the other. If you don’t do that then you’re either lazy or incompetent. American men especially, and more and more women all the time, seem to think that life is like a mission. That’s how they approach sports and war and sex—even love. That’s what they think about when somebody’s credit goes bad or there’s an accident on the road: somebody veered off the straight and narrow."

Good things happen to evil people. Tragedies and small troubles happen to the best of people. Life is simply not that easy.