No Where But Up

"There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny" - Han Solo

My entire life I have heard people say, "Everything happens for a reason," despite how demonstrably untrue that statement proves to be.  It feels great to think that and I'd love to believe it, but it doesn't take long to think about all the flaws in that belief.  The key really comes down to the meaning of the word "reason."  If you give it a metaphysical meaning, something only a god can understand, well why are we even having this discussion then? But if you give it meaning of "greater good," it ceases to make sense. The cliche seems to assume that everyone gets a happy ending and everything that happens to us along the way are just lessons or twists of fate to get us to some final positive destination.  But how many people really end up at that final positive destination?

I'm genuinely a positive person and I'm not out for killing Santa Claus, and this is such a positive saying, but platitudes like, "it is all going to be ok," may make one feel better, but objectively have no basis in truth.  That would have been a better saying to take on.

It depends on the perspective you are looking at it from.  So an infant dies, well [insert grand reason here], but it ignores the fact that--to that infant--no reason is going to be good enough to justify being dead.  I guess you could factor in some reward in heaven or something for dying to teach your parents to appreciate each moment with loved ones or something like that, but you get what I'm saying.

Once again, this doesn't discount that it is still a nice phrase we use to make ourselves feel better when things go wrong.  I mean, either it can suck or it's just God's way of teaching us a lesson or helping us achieve our fate.  The latter sounds a lot better.  But then I think, oh like the lesson, "don't drive drunk", which you learned because you crashed and died after drinking. Not much use you can make of that lesson now.  Oh..... it was the lesson to your alcoholic uncle.  I get it now.  That is an unfair Ponzi scheme.

I think the more apt motivation behind the phrase is that, you should be ever positive and look for the positive possibilities and opportunities in your negative experiences.   That life is a journey and everything that happens to you is part of what got you to where you are at (for the better or worse.)  That is a lesson that everyone should follow, I genuinely mean that, but not for the reason that you believe God let something bad happen to you so that he could later he could do something really good for you.  Really, a bit selfish and narcissistic, no?

What a wet blanket I feel like I'm being, but I'm not advocating taking away the comfort a person has when they believe this, but I'm just saying that there are other ways to deal with the fact that you don't always have control of what happens to you or your loved ones.  Bad things happens to good people and sometimes good things happens to bad people.  Life isn't always fair and our outcomes are not all equal.  I think when you accept that, you tend to appreciate good things even more.  There are many things you can do to improve your outcomes, but you should always be doing that.

Now of course, there is also the understanding that universe follows the rules of physics and you have the action reaction thing, so yes, there was an "actual reason" behind what happened, but it is not the profound future looking reason people impute into that statement.  Nor does it necessarily mean something better will come from it in the future.  Though I will say, when bad things happen, usually there is nowhere to go but up, so there is that is another good way of looking at it.

I heard this phrase the other day and it made remember that you can't always control life, a lot of things you can control to an extent, but life is really just what make of it.  So why not just work to make the best of it, no matter what your circumstances?  Some people have their faith which lets you have peace that god is in control, which works great for some people.

Having over thought this for longer than I had planned, for me it comes down to looking at "reason" in "future" or "past" tense.  Anything that happens in your "past" you can attribute to something positive that has happened to you since then.  It was the "reason" you were in the right place at the right time.  But it doesn't logically work like that going forward into the "future." You can't say, X bad thing happened to me today, but for the purpose of the unknown Y good thing happening in the future.

You know, maybe I'm just completely wrong, maybe I'll never understand "the reason", but you know what, if it really is a heavenly conspiracy outside of human understanding, then you don't know either, which doesn't make that statement true.  I don't really know why I went through this brain exercise, maybe because I felt like getting some much needed writing in, plus, it made me feel better.  Maybe hearing someone throw around the cliche happened for that reason.

what I should believe and what I do believe don't always match up