Hello friends and welcome to my sixtieth blog.
“Everything happens for a reason”.
I am certain that you are all as familiar with these words as I am. I can not count the number of times I have heard these words, either coming out of my mouth or out of the mouths of others.
When things go pear, I believe I say this to make myself feel better or to deal with a tough situation or emotion. It often does not help, and this then frustrates me. In fact, I often think this sentence is a load of crummy nonsense. So, this got me to thinking and reading. Let us be honest here, so often there does not seem to be a rhyme or reason for things happening and going wrong, even retrospectively or in hindsight. I get that we use this phrase to offer ourselves and perhaps others comfort by giving meaning to events that often seem to occur without any feasible reason but this is not good enough for me. Could we be using the reason as a crutch for us to avoid growth? It is quite a thought but one worth delving into, as far as I am concerned. Then there is this higher power or this power greater than ourselves. God is my higher power. Does God have a preordained script for my life? Not an easy question to answer. It makes me a tad confused, too. Here, I might add that I do seem to get confused rather easily, so that is no big deal. However, I felt that I needed to make some sense out of this whole story.
If we explore this further and a little more in depth, it does not seem to make sense that the sole purpose of life’s heartaches, failures, losses, and illness is to teach us a lesson that we have been preordained to learn. A failed dream, a severe illness, natural disasters – each is horrid in its own way. However, it seems to be a copout for us to put it down to a power greater than ourselves. It is almost as if we are handing over any form of accountability for what goes wrong in our lives. We do not feel happy taking responsibility for what has happened. What also happens is that we spend so much time trying to figure out why something happened to us that we leave no space for those positive emotions that will allow us to realise that this is just a thing that happened to us and we can so deal with it.
It is a similar way of thinking that folk adopt about success. After all, according to most people, success is only being at the right place at the right time. She was just so lucky, she worked for the right company during the right time as they were listing the company. Of course, a bit of good luck goes a long way in helping you succeed, but, seriously, a bloody lot of hard, ongoing, consistent work is really the main reason for success. The responsibility for success is on us. In the same way as the responsibility for creating meaning out of life’s biggest disappointments is. We can not just fob this off onto the nearest thing.
Obviously, we must own up to mistakes that may have led to a failure, but often there is simply no good reason why something bad has happened, nor should we accept that there is. So, what shall we do about this quandary?
I need to stipulate here that the events that I am referring to here are the things that happen to us that are a little difficult and frustrating, and relatively easy to get over. I am not writing about the dreadfully sad or terrible things that happen to too many people, that unspeakable loss or trauma, or those suffering from a debilitating or life-threatening disease, to name but a few. I have no expertise, experience, or education with respect to these, and therefore I have no authority to write about them. I also am not a psychologist or philosopher, and a great deal of what I write is my opinion, which may not be right.
Exploring further, I stumbled across the following: “We don’t own events or why they happen. We own what we do with them.” This really resonated with me. When Rich had his skiing accident, I spent hours thinking about why this needed to happen and I was very grumpy and totally “woe is me.” I was afraid, lonely, sad and very worried. To cut a long story short, after an extensive period of self-exploration and self-reflection, I decided I needed to make more of my life. This resulted in my doing my nutrition diploma, launching my website, and starting my blog. In retrospect this really did guide me through making sense of what had happened. It gave meaning to Rich’s accident. This is very different from looking and finding a reason for what happened Thinking about this, in fact, one can have meaning, without having a reason. One focuses on the past and the other on the future. I do not believe that I would have done any of this if Rich had not fallen on the slopes on that sunny day in the Alps. This bad thing happened for reasons I could not understand, or even accept. I could not own the event or the reason for it. What I could do was to own own the way in which I managed it and believe you me. I also made the very most of the bubbles and January sales!
On the flip side, there are often things that happen for which we have a rational and logical explanation. I do not dispute this in any way. I just feel that we need to look a little beyond just this. Natural disasters are one relatively small example. I just wanted to look at the whole narrative from another perspective.
Make no mistake, friends, this is not a walk in the park on a clear sunny day. Creating meaning requires heavy lifting, a great deal of work and so much more effort than accepting some unexpected reason that you have no control over. I still need to make sense of losing Muz and the ongoing Covid pandemic. It seems apparent to me that the universe has an order. No matter how hard you try, you can not get away from it. However, while fate is set by outside forces, destiny involves choice. If I dig really deep, I do realize that I can shape my destiny by seizing the moment and taking action.
I believe that we can forge our own path forward based on what we have learnt from our experiences. So much easier said than done. Oh, my word! We so need to let ourselves have those grumpy, feeling sorry for ourselves days, during which we need to treat ourselves with kindness, compassion and love. This also does not take away from the fact that we have to grieve and work through our losses, failures and disappointments in other ways. However, ultimately if we can, it is about making lemonade out of lemons or for me personally, champagne out of grapes!
Golly gosh, guys, this has definitely little heavy I want to reiterate that in my opinion applying these principles will probably possible when not so serious stuff happens, but it would be exceptionally difficult to do this when something unbearable happens. Please also remeber these are just my thoughts.
It seems that having a beautiful holiday with very dear friends has made me ponder deeply. Hope you are all okay with this. i shall endeavour to write a more lighthearted blog next time. In the meantime have fun, look after yourselves and go out there and live your very best life!
Thanks to some great ideas from Thomas Koulopoulos.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!