Things Happen For A Reason?

[Brother Jeff]

One of the things Dr. Amy and I talked about the other day is how things seem to happen for a reason. For instance, my cat wife Tasha. I moved to Amarillo in 1999 for a job that turned out to be short-lived. The work they hired me for never really materialized. But while I was there, I got my cat wife Tasha, and she turned out to be the best non-human friend I have ever had. She was there for me all the time and she helped me and loved me through some really hard times. When her time came and she died, though it's been really hard to take, it was at a time that I was mentally healthy enough to deal with it.

 

We talked too about some former friends of mine. I found out recently the kind of people they really are and for those reasons I am no longer friends with them. But their serious character flaws that I know about now aside, they were good friends to me years ago and at the time I needed them. They were in my life for a reason.

 

My awesome doctors seem to be in my life for a reason too. Ginger is the most caring doctor I probably have ever had, and my naturopath Dr. Grove is awesome. He is a very kind and compassionate man who really likes me and really cares about me. I have a good psychiatrist now, and my therapist, Dr. Amy, is amazing. I really like her and really work well with her.

 

I even think that about religion. As much as I wish things could have been different and I wish I had found healthier ways to cope with the mental illness I didn't know I had back in those days, I think religious belief helped me a lot. It may even be why I'm still alive now because it gave me some stability and I made many good friends who helped me a lot. I don't need or want religion now, but maybe I did need it back then. It was a part of my life for those years for a reason. Then too, there is the fact that if I hadn't been religious for years, I wouldn't be a member of the Ex-C forums now, and I wouldn't have the many great people there as friends. They too are in my life now for a reason.

 

On the other hand, I can think of at least one person who has been in my life who has really hurt me. Rebecca was Evil Incarnate. The worst person I have ever encountered. I didn't realize the kind of person she really was until it was too late and the damage was done. She used me, abused me, and threw me away when she was done with me. If there was a purpose for her being in my life at the time, I can't imagine what it could have been.

 

Thoughts? Thanks and Glory!

[Leo]

Are you sure things happen for a reason? Or is it possible that you and the people around you created reason / meaning out of what was going on?

It is good to take stock of what has gone well. Better still to take stock of how you and other people around you created well-being in various situations.

It's entirely possible that religion served a purpose. It's an explanation, if a flawed one, for not-yet-understood phenomena. It's human community which you've said that you enjoyed.

But you are human. You and other humans use reason and create meaning.

Perhaps instead of looking for meaning in everythihng, do what you can to create meaning and well-being in the situations you're in. The "everything happens for a reason" argument is still pretty top-heavy. Also, when we say that, we usually only mean the things we fondly look back upon, or at most things we used and learned from that were unpleasant at the time but had the foresight to get something out of.

But you create meaning by doing what you can with what you've got.

 

I wasn't made blind for a reason. Some hardware just got screwed up on the assembly line, that's all. I don't even draw any particular meaning from being blind, and people who claim they are inspired by me being blind don't really seem to be doing anything extraordinary as a result. But there are probably things that I have done in life that I wouldn't have, if I could see.

When I was in my 20s, I used to think that being blind probably made me more empathetic to others' experiences, made me more of an independent worker since I have to do more just to get the same amount of things in life. Especially then before modern technology. But the longer I've lived, and the more blind people I've met, I've found that that thinking I used to have was totally and completely fallacious.

Some Christians, especially older ones, were befuddled to learn how skeptical I am to experiences. They had this idea that being blind automatically meant being better at faith-based things, more open to spirituality, stuff like that. But at the churches, my preferred activities were washing the dishes, helping out with food and supplies for the disenfranchised, maintaining systems of theirs, things like that. Even when I was on a praise and worship team, I was there because I knew how to play music and enjoyed it. I didn't have all the experiences people imagine the blind are supposed to have.

I'm telling you this because all that narrative people have about "everything happens for a reason?" In my case it turned out to be complete bunk.

 

Definitely enjoy and take meaning from the experiences, create a better life for you and those around you, do all the simple things that come naturally to you.

Even as a Christian, I bet you, like many of us, created meaning in situations. Were you ever in a meeting where some lady gets up and gives a prayer request, maybe she's got a couple kids, maybe a missing partner, and she carries on and on and on at greate length in providing a description. And you and a couple friends after dutifully doing the prayer thing got together and fixed things so her "request" was answered? Maybe you gave the correct response externally, that the god was just using you at the time ... could've been anyone. But deep down inside, where nobody can see you, you knew that if you didn't do it, odds were measurably against her getting what she needed? Even if she never knew it was you guys, Christianity making it very easy and acceptable to do things that way, you knew how the "reason" happened. Even if later she waxed eloquent in church about learning about trust you knew exactly what happened, and what would have happened if you hadn't done anything about it. Even without what the Christians call pride, you were probably sober about it, realizing this poor person would have gone without unless you took care of things, preferably anonymously so there was no interference.

You probably did something like this, even if it wasn't an all out plant of a $20 bill or something where the requester would magically mythically find it. Evenn as a Christian, even right in the heart of the Pentecostals, some of whom were too busy shouting and flailing to notice, quite a few of people I ran with did such things. Whatever external spin we put on it to legitimize our activities, we were creating meaning, applying the "reason" to unreasonable circumstances.

 

Hope this helps you, man.

It doesn't mean you can't have some spiritual something about all this. You probably could, I guess. Certainly enjoy the process of creating meaning, making a better life for those around you and so forth. It's elevating in ways no predefined book-learned stuff is.

[yunea]

Well it sure feels better to look back on your life and find that it meant something, than it does to find it's been a chaotic and completely meaningless thing.

 

I still struggle with this because I used to be a major believer in a great big plan and now it's painful to look back and hard to know what to build my identity upon. I have to re-think what I used to think were the most important things about my past. But, I hope to not be afraid to think of it someday.

[florduh]

There has to be a reason for something to happen, but that doesn't imply there's a purpose. Shit happens; some good, some bad, some neutral. IOW, when one door opens as another one closes, the reason is probably a change in the air pressure of the room.

[Ellinas]

I'm not going to attempt to suggest what you should make of this, Jeff.  Just to offer a couple of thoughts on alternative approaches.

 

On the one hand, it is possible to go down the full-blown "everything has a purpose in the context of my life" approach.  Everything is seen as having meaning and purpose.  This could be seen as the intervention of a deity, or in the context of the concept of fate, or of karma, and possibly other ideas I've not considered

 

There are dangers in this.  Recently I came across the suggestion that, within a certain occult order, there exists a so called "oath of the abyss".  This obliges the person who has taken the oath to seek meaning in every event in his or her life.  It is, according to the suggestion I have seen, an extreme approach that carries a serious risk of provoking paranoia.

 

From a more general standpoint, divine intervention and/or fate tend to militate against free-will.  Now, you may or may not believe that you have free-will (and that is not necessarily an issue of divine intervention or fate, but simply an issue of how you view the concept of a "mind"), but it is very easy to use this outlook as a way of divesting yourself of responsibility for your own actions.  All that happens, all you are and all you do can become a matter predetermined.

 

Karma, depending on how you think it might work, need not be so mechanistic, in my view, as it can be considered in the context of your own desires within a cyclical reality.  The issue here would be one of "be careful what you wish for".

 

On the other hand, if you reject the concept of meaning and purpose in your life's events, the fact remains that you are what you are because of what you have been and what has happened to you.  In that sense, your past will always have meaning for you personally within the framework of your own life and experience, despite there being no guiding hand or mechanism.  "Meaning", but not "purpose".  They are simply the events that have shaped you.

 

There are all sorts of combinations of the above that you could choose as your preferred view - a sort of partial fate that still permits a level of individual will, for example.  This, however, is likely to leave you unable to decide what you wish to regard as purposeful and what mere chance.

 

See it as you will...

[FreeThinkerNZ]

I don't believe "things happen for a reason" in any non-practical sense.  Humans are pattern seeking individuals.  We want to know why things happen.  Sometimes terrible things happen that seem to serve no positive purpose.  We can either look for some reason that makes us feel better, or we can accept that shit happens.

 

I live with a chronic illness for which there is no known effective treatment. I feel infinitely better just accepting that, than I did when I was searching for a treatment,* and searching for some reason why this happened.  Shit happens.  Now I can get on with living.

 

 

 

 

 

*I still keep on eye on new developments to see if a treatment has become available.