A Karmic Birthday Wish

Stupid birthday wish.

For the past ten years, I make wishes for myself (hey, it’s my birthday, right?) and they never come true. I’m not married to a supermodel. I don’t have a sports car parked in the driveway. Heck, I don’t even have a driveway to park in, which pretty much means the whole mansion wish didn’t exactly work out either. So a friend tells me that maybe it’s karma. Maybe my wishes aren’t coming true because I’m being materialistic and selfish and shallow. Maybe if I made a wish for someone or something else, it would bring good karma back to me, and then I’d get what I want next year.

Okay, fair enough. I’m a reasonable person. Nothing’s happened in the past decade, so what’s another year to wait? If I make a birthday wish for myself this year and it doesn’t come true, the streak of no luck continues. So if I make a wish for someone else and it doesn’t come true, I haven’t lost anything. And if it does come true, then I only need to wait one more year before all this karma is supposedly going to come back and bless me with all kinds of good fortune.

So I made the wish for someone else. That same friend of mine, Jack, has been having some financial problems. He lost his job last year, and he and his wife have been struggling to make ends meet ever since. Shows you the kind of decent guy he is; when he was giving me the whole spiel about making a wish for someone else, he doesn’t once mention that I should wish good things for him. Which is why that’s exactly what I did. I wished that he would find a new job and his money problems would be over.

Apparently my wishes are pretty potent when they’re aimed at someone else.

A week later, Jack does end up getting a new job. In fact, it’s such a great job, his wife is able to quit working and stay home with the kids. They can afford to move into a nice house, get new cars to replace their old ones that were dying slow deaths; they even got a vacation home on Maui.

Now don’t get me wrong; Jack and his wife and kids are the greatest people in the world. They deserve all the good things in life, and I’m happier than anything to see them finally have something good happen to them, especially after the rough year they’ve had. So this isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that after ten years of nada when it comes to my own birthday wishes, this one doesn’t just come true, it comes true in full force and beyond the wildest dreams I had ever intended. It’s like buying a lottery scratcher and thinking, “Maybe I’ll win a few bucks,” then walking away with twenty grand.

What if this was my year? What if there’s no such thing as karma; if birthday wishes only come true every ten years ... or all that good birthday wish energy gets saved up, and I just let that whole reserve out and emptied the tank for Jack?

My mind keeps going back to what he said about karma. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I can’t help but hope that this whole karma thing is real. Because after things happened for Jack in a big way off my birthday wish, all I can say is that I better get that mansion of my own next year.

With a sports car in the driveway and my supermodel wife in the passenger seat.

Come on, karma. It’s the least you can do.



(622 words)