The Crisis of the Missing Keys

"If I love you, then you will love me."
-Don Ruiz, in The Four Agreements

Karma and I have broken up several times before because of some trust issues. This weekend, we got back together.

About 3 weeks ago, I was on my way to spin class in a gym at Penn State. After I had changed in the bathroom, something shiny caught my eye. The king of all rings suddenly stared me straight in the face. Someone had clearly dropped this precious piece of jewelery by accident, surrendering it to the filth on the bathroom floor. I was immediately overwhelmed with a compelling urge to swipe it.

There have been no other instances of theivery in my past that I can think of. But this ring was fantastic. It was just the perfect size, and the design on it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I justified taking it by assuming that someone had left it there by accident and would never come back to look for it anyway. Karma fixed its withering eye upon me as I slipped the shiny silver ring onto my finger.

Three weeks later I lost the keys to my apartment and to my car. They were both on the same key lanyard that had apparently fallen out of my backpack on campus that day. Most people would never think to construct a connection between the two events that I have just described, but because my guilty conscience is so impressively strong I couldn't help but relate these two scenarios. I spent the next two days frantically searching for my keys on campus, tracing every step that I made the day that my keys had disappeared. Know what I found? Someone else's keys. They dangled from a lanyard that was strikingly similar to that of my own set of keys - a situation that Alanis Morisette would have argued was rather "ironic." I was pissed. I actually did a double-take of these keys, hoping that upon second glance I could turn the keys into my own if I stared at them hard enough. Apparently my jedi-mind powers were a little rusty that day.

I kept walking and headed toward the classroom I was en-route to in hopes of reuniting with my own keys when I realized what I had just done. To sparknote the rest of this anecdote, I turned in the keys that I found to the lost-and-found at the center of campus where I thought someone might turn mine it at. I also took my stolen ring off because I figured if some supernatural force was at work here, I might as well take off the karma-infested ring just in case.

The next day, after making about 20 prior efforts to try to locate my stupid keys, I asked the lost-and-found desk at the center of campus if anyone had turned anything in that matched my description again as a final resort. When the lady held up my precious keys I almost lept over the counter to kiss her. Not sure how acceptable that woulda been.

The story sounds incredibly insignificant. But if you choose to learn from any small event in your life instead of just letting it pass you by, you might end up finding meaning in everything. When I found my keys, I put the ring that I had stolen back in the gym on the sink next to where I had found it. Even though I returned it a whole three weeks after I had found the ring, I desperately hoped that maybe some force of nature would alert its rightful owner of the return.

The key crisis "unlocked" a whole set of positive lessons for me. It forced me to stop driving my car to campus every day, which made me get on my tri-bike to commute and enjoy the glorious weather instead. It also taught me to appreciate convenience. Most importantly, though, the tragic misplacement of my keys taught me that for every little action that we make in our lives, there is always one to mirror it in some mysterious way. I do believe that. I believe that whenever we invest in a genuine act of kindness or cruelty, it floats around in the atmosphere until it finds a karma-mate with whom it can attach to and influence you either positively or negatively. It might be totally false. But the saying "do unto others as you would expect them to do unto you" really resonates with me. If everyone lived that way, wouldn't we be free of misery? Who knows. But I'll be the first to give it a try.

Karma and I have settled our trust issues and will have a fabulous future because I will agree to love always. I want to send only acts of kindness into Karma's playing field.

Thank God I didn't have to spend my tip money on a new set of keys.