It was November 2018 and I had managed, by coincidence, to escape smoke from the fires raging in Northern California by a single day. My flight back to New York from an important event I had been working out in San Francisco departed early in the morning, by afternoon fires had created all kinds of delays and cancelations. Smoke filled the skies of San Francisco, air quality went to the danger zone, friends were texting me pictures of orange and black skies, complaining it was impossible to breathe.  A part of me felt relief that my asthmatic self hadn’t been caught in the fires. But another part of me felt ‘survivor’s guilt’; as the fires raged on, I started feeling bad that I had escaped when I had so many friends and co-workers stuck and suffering.

A few days later, I went to have coffee with a friend in NY and told her of my guilt. In my mind, my guilt was a sign of my compassion, my deep empathy for friends. So, you can imagine my surprise when my coffee companion told me to get over myself and quit being so egotistical. “Egotistical, WTF?” I thought. “Everyone finds their own way” she explained.

After we talked, I thought more about what she said: Everyone does find  their own way, i.e. each person has their own karma. As I wondered and worried about why everyone else couldn’t just leave, or find a way to be spared, what I was really doing was wondering why everyone wasn’t just like me. I was assuming everyone would be as effected as me. Everyone would have priorities like me. Everyone would  have the same causes and effects as me. I was being egotistical, missing the differences that exist amongst people who are, well, not me.

But, in my self-centered assumptions, I was making a more subtle , but equally egotistical error — I was missing the sameness between me and everyone else. This time, I may have been spared suffering. This time, I watched from afar as the skies turned black, and with distance felt pity mixed with superiority: I was spared after all. But what about times before and times after? In one instant, one situation, I can count myself advantaged –my karma allowed escape; but like everyone, I am subject to my karma, my turn at suffering has happened before and it inevitably will again.