Karma or Coincidence?

If you don't know by now - i'm a conversation whore. No, really... I am. Mental orgasms shake my brain - and my brain needs a good rattle now and then.

This past weekend I had a pretty decent discussion with this young cardiologist at my mother's hospital. Sitting in the waiting room watching the news, he sits down besides me and says= "Mind if i sit beside you, i promise not to break your heart..."

Yea, so you know my response was laced with both sarcasm and yougottobekiddingme.. but despite how the conversation started, it ended quite opposite. He didn't break my heart but he did shake my brain. And now that it's shaking, I of course want your feelings and reacations.. So here's how it went.

In the beginining of the conversation, he told me how he found a wallet in the waiting room two days prior... and he kept the cash (about $100 or so) that was in it-but mailed back the wallet. Of course.. me being me- i naturally point out how he is a doctor- and why would he stoop and keep the cash when he of all people surely doesn't need it.. He laughs it off and says something along the lines of any person in that situation would have done the same thing.

Granted, he may be right. But i tell him that something like that just isn't karmic and he should have mailed the entire wallet to the person-regardless of what "any person" would have done. He tells me he does not believe in Karma... to which i simply nodded and then our conversation drifted into another direction ...and that was that.

until ...

about 10 minutes later a nurse comes in and asks if he wants anything from the caf. he goes to get cash out of his pants.... and as you can guess.. no cash. He excuses himself and i'm assuming goes on a manhunt for his wallet... comes back say 5 minutes later "laughing". Says to me "you'll never believe it... i lost my wallet, how funny of a coincidence is that?"

Ha! i say (so sympatetic i am, eh?) KARMA not coincidence.

then he stumps me (i hate being stumped). He asks what the difference is..

what is the differece between Karma and coincidence?

so i respond- a coincidence is what transpires when two completely unconnected events cross paths with eachother, and marry themselves on the border of parallel relativity. Karma, on the otherhand, is the little person standing on that same border who either smacks you in the face or grants you a free pass into that domain.

he manages to spit out a noteworthy "touche" before he got paged and had to head back to "unbreaking people's hearts."

so..in a situation like this.. is there really a difference between karma and coincidence? is it "just" a coincidence, or was it karma? if he returned that wallet with the cash, would he still have lost his?

If i was never taught to look before i crossed the street... would i have been someones wieldshield smudge by now?

how do we really know?

in retrospect, things are easy to pinpoint. afterall, hindsight is 20/20. But one can only speculate what could have happened- when it never does.

Karma is the embodiment of everything we do and do not. it's your personal boomerang. what u toss into life- you eventually will get back.

so is the actual coincidence the path the boomerang takes when it spirals on its return flight back, OR are you just getting it back simply because you tossed it?

feed my brain. make it shake.