How to make sense of it all...

My friend Murtaza always repeats this one line whenever I get a little low or start cribbing...he says that "Eventually, good things are bound to happen to good people...that is the law of life.." He always says that. Always. And then he gives me an example...of some different person...everytime...and then I believe in those lines for some days...but I see so many problems and so much pain with so many people I know, that I almost always end up wanting to refute that 'feel good' statement. Because if that statement is true, then the conclusion to be drawn is that all these people I know are bad...and the answer to which is negative. So what is the reason for all this misery then? Before I jump to a conclusion, its important to notice his statement that these 'good' things will happen over a long period of time and happen when you least expect them to happen. And that is when his statement truly sinks in. Life does not pay you back in the same currency. We would get it back, but when and how is not for us to decide. And there lies the problem. We have this dedicated calculator in our minds that keeps on calculating whether we have got our dues back from life. And that calculator is not working correctly in most minds. It is biased and adds our problems more than it subtracts the goodness that we have got back and thus the total never reaches back to zero and we always end up feeling that life still has something to give back to us. The day we get this calculation fine-tuned to work correctly, I believe most of us would be happier.

My reason for this philosophical indulgence is because my friend is going thru a bad time. B A D bad. And these lines, from the Jagjit Singh song 'Kyon zindagi ki rah mein.....', perfectly summarize her situation:

Aisa nahi ke humko, koi bhi khushi nahi..
Lekin yeh zindagi bhi koi...zindagi nahi...

It's like this feeling of emptiness, even when you are in a group of friends. You dont really know why you feel so sad about something or is it even justified that you feel sad about it or whether that someone is even worth your sadness. And even after knowing all these things, the truth is that you do feel sad about it. All the time. When after every laughter there is this silence when your memory takes you back to some old situation...when everything was so good. And then the mind, given its perfect sense of timing, pops up this 'will it/I/they/life ever be the same again?' type of question.

Thats when helplessness starts to sink in. A person who is so used to being in control of the situation, someone to whom others look up to for help..all the time, someone that others think is so poised and confident has infact become so fragile and brittle within. And I feel helpless about not being able to help my friend out. I can only talk her out of it and talking doesn't seem to work. And thus again I see Murtaza's belief-system of good things happening to good people failing. Or is it just that my minds calculator is not fine-tuned? And while thinking about all this, the only lines that come to my mind are from U2's 'Stuck in a moment you can't get out of'....

I never thought you were a fool...
But darling look at you...
You gotta stand up straight...
Carry your own weight...
These tears are going nowhere baby...