everything happens for a reason…

the past two weeks, i’ve been incredibly sick. fever, coughing, napping…the whole shebang! i’m in the depths of college applications and senior year and i keep telling myself (mainly to calm myself down) that this was meant to happen. but, i just can’t accept that. the most important time of the year…i’m missing school, in bed, unable to do anything but sleep and drink tea. so, i thought to myself, why do people always say “everything happens for a reason” during the worst of times?

i get that we use the phrase to offer comfort by giving meaning to events that often seem to be without any conceivable reason. but, i've always found it somewhat unsettling to believe that the sole purpose of life's heartaches and losses are to teach us some fateful lesson that we have been predetermined to learn. while we should own up to mistakes we've made, often times there is simply no “good” reason why something bad has happened, nor should we accept that there is. 

the "reason" bad things happen isn't somehow woven into our life's trajectory. terrible things do not happen for reasons we can understand, or even accept. but that doesn't mean that we are helpless. we are the ones who give meaning to what happens in our life —with or without an acceptable reason.

if you are looking for the reason to somehow make itself known to you, to magically appear, to fall from the sky, neatly wrapped with a bow, then you are avoiding the much harder work of taking what happened to you and creating something that has value; something which you will look back on with the pride of knowing that you weren't following a script but instead writing it. or maybe that’s just my look on it!

we don't own events or their reasons. we own what we do with them.

what happens is that when you look backwards, especially when you are a bit older, it often seems as if things did happen for a reason. if you hadn't met this person, then a certain event would never have happened. if you hadn't gone to some place, you'd never have achieved such and such dream. but the reality is, you had to end up somewhere. right? all decisions lead to some state, and looking back from that state, it can seem you were “meant” to get there.

people whose journeys worked out well will tell you to “enjoy your journey” and remind you that “everything happens for a reason.” but you journey may end differently, without you achieving the goals you set.

i think i would rephrase it to “everything that has happened led to where you are now.” it could be good or it could be bad, but moving forward, you can take steps to be where you want to be.

maybe i’m totally wrong. maybe i’m simply trying to cope with being stuck at home. maybe i’m being a little half glass empty right now. but, this is just what i think at the moment. subject to change :)

hope everyone is healthy and taking care of themselves!

eliza