The leveling out

If there is one law of the universe that I would like to believe holds sway over all else, it is that things come back to us. Good things, bad things, things we have forgotten or buried, people and places, the inevitable disguised as the unexpected, will all eventually seep their way back into our lives as coherent flashes of justice meted out with just enough irony to knock us on our ass.

I tell myself this as much from experience as instinct -- or perhaps a truly idealistic belief that things will work out, because they must.

And by work out, I mean, bring into focus the contradictions that left unchecked would render the search for satisfying narrative resolution utterly meaningless.

I say all this knowing how ridiculous it sounds -- knowing that if there were any kind of karmic justice in the world things would have turned out better for so many people, and worse for so many more, knowing that what cynicism didn't come to me naturally through halfhearted adolescent detachment, has been instilled in me over years spent pushing rocks up hills at the behest of crusty old men who had long since replaced repetitious compulsion with genuine struggle.

And still, things -- personal, seismic and otherwise -- seem to be coming to cosmic fruition this week.

If I were the kind of person that paid attention to the movement of the heavens as bellwether for why certain things work out when they do, I would guess that the planets are facing off in a cosmic dance of opposites, in which things are being pulled apart and forced to reconvene at eye level.

I am too lazy, however, to really make a concerted effort to try to predict via the heavens the moments when cosmic disruption will occur, so instead I often try to see my way to end of things, to guess -- or more often, will -- how it will all turn out.

I am always wrong.

This week, in particular, the ways in which I have been wrong stick in my throat and weigh me down with realizations long held at bay by sheer will power and/or self delusion.

But resolutions, unpleasant or otherwise, are hard to come by.

And there is a certain satisfaction at recognizing that the hand of fate -- or blind narrative irony, whichever -- that push our lives in the unexpected directions they take, may, indeed, be more powerful than the childlike fantasies we build for ourselves.