What goes around comes around

A sailboat called Karma.
(Photo: TootSweetCarole/Pixabay | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

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Idiom: What goes around comes around

While English has become the lingua franca for international communication, it is not the best language in the world.

Many other languages can express complex thoughts and ideas in a single word, whereas English requires a long-winded expression.

This is probably why the English language has become very good at stealing words from these foreign tongues: and so on becomes etcetera, reduce, reuse, recycle or waste not, want not becomes mottainai, and what goes around comes around becomes karma.

If you understand the Sanskrit word karma, then you can easily understand the meaning of what goes around comes around.


For those of you who are not familiar with it, what goes around comes around means what you do in life to others will, one way or another, eventually come back to you.


So, if you do good things for people, people will do good things for you and vice versa

We will all have to suffer the consequences of our actions.

If you are the person sitting on the subway while an older person stands, remember what goes around comes around.

There will come a day when you need a seat either because you are sick or elderly, and there will be a person who does the same thing to you.

At that point in your life, you will have no excuse for feeling hard done by or becoming angry.

Life has a way of evening things out in the end.

What goes around comes around or, as Sanskrit so eloquently calls it – karma.


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Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 68.

The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.