Sometimes There's Just No Reasoning With Me

I’m super excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented bloggers.  Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.   

Here are the links to the other fabulous blogs:

Merryland Girl

Froggie

Moma Rock

This week’s topic came from me, and I asked:  Do you believe everything happens for a reason?  Here is my take:

            A few weeks ago, I met the administrator at the retirement center where I volunteer (for fun, let’s call her Ann).  While we were discussing my volunteer work, my prior job as an attorney came up.  Ann asked what kind of law I practiced, and I told her (insurance law, which involves big, icky accidents, fires, etc.).  As Ann listened, she got an odd look on her face.  When I finished, she told me she is currently involved in litigation like I’d just described:  she’d lost her son in an accident and she was preparing to attend a mediation in the case.  Ann became really anxious as she spoke.  She was clearly uncomfortable.  Ann told me she had no idea what to expect at the mediation, and she had no desire to be in the same room as opposing counsel.  Underneath that stress lay Ann’s yet-to-be assuaged grief about losing her son, suddenly and tragically and too young. 

            Feeling a combination of mixed instincts – lawyer and caretaker – I told Ann how mediations usually work:  how she’d likely not be in the room with the other side, how the mediator would go back and forth between the parties, how she’d probably say little to nothing during that day.  I watched Ann visibly relax as I spoke – but I also saw her fighting back tears.  So I said, “If this is too upsetting, just let me know and we can talk about something else.”  Ann got a funny smile and said, “No, it’s ok.  Everything happens for a reason, and I was supposed to talk to you today.”

            I left Ann’s office feeling happy that maybe I’d quelled some of her anxiety, but she stayed on my mind for the next few weeks, in part because I knew her mediation loomed, but also in part because her comment nagged at me.  “Everything happens for a reason,” she’d said, and she believed it.  The problem was I did not.

            I do not believe things happen for a reason.  There is no grand plan, no destiny, nothing that is “meant to be.”  I embrace free will over predetermination.  I see life as a series of random events that make sense only when we intentionally force them to fit together, when we assign a theme meant to weave these scattered happenings into something resembling meaning.  If we find a reason, it’s because we placed it there.  It did not come packaged so. 

            This is not to say that we can’t take something away from our experiences, even our negative ones.   But I simply don’t buy that those experiences happened so as to teach us that lesson.  Shit happens.  What we do with the stuff falls solely on us.

              I do believe in coincidence.  And I know sometimes it’s super tempting to try to twist simple happenstance into something more substantial, something with meaning.  Mere coincidence brought Ann and I together on the eve of her mediation:  coincidence . . . and nothing more. 

            I also believe in hard work.  There’s a great deal of truth in the expression, “The harder I work, the luckier I am.”  And, so, when someone works really hard and makes the Olympic swim team, she didn’t make the team because she is lucky or because the Universe holds a grand plan; she made the team because she worked really hard . . . and nothing more.

            Pretty simple stuff.

            As I’ve aged, I’ve come to note a link between those who believe “everything happens for a reason” and those who believe in a Higher Power.  This makes a great deal of sense to me.  In part, people look to religion – to Supreme Beings, to a powerful Universe – to make sense out of the nonsense, to find order in the chaos we call daily life.   People want to believe there is a reason for all of it, particularly when life gets difficult or painful.  I understand that line of thinking, but I don’t subscribe to it.  Sometimes life is hard, and sometimes it downright sucks.  There’s no metaphysical “reason” someone dies from cancer, no reason another person becomes afflicted with Alzheimer’s.  (Obviously, biological reasons exist, and life choices and environment may come into play, but that isn’t the issue here.)  It seems more palatable to believe someone’s illness or death is part of a Bigger Plan and not just another of life’s random, painful, senseless losses. 

            I’ll admit that, even though I don’t believe things happen for a reason, I, too, try to make sense of it all.  But, more often than not, much of life makes no sense.  And so I’ve embraced the phrase, “It is what it is,” because, at the end of the day, regardless of why something is happening or how it fits into some elusive Big Picture, we are still left to deal with what life throws our way.   

            Years ago, in a high school religion class, we debated free will versus predetermination.  I staunchly endorsed the former, and I’ve never, ever wavered.  Perhaps because of this, one of my favorite memes making its way around is the one that says:  “Everything happens for a reason.  But sometimes that reason is you’re stupid and make bad decisions.”  I’ve made my share of bad decisions, and I’m quite sure I’m not done.  But I will go to my grave believing – knowing – the decisions are, indeed, mine.  And I will accept (with as much as grace as I can muster) that the only Big Picture is the one I’ve created through my own (often stupid) choices and my own hard work combined with coincidence and a large dash of life’s randomness, both good and bad . . . and nothing more.