Everything happens for a reason?
Not necessarily. Not always. There is always a cause, a sequence of events, but this is not the same as some mysterious divine benevolent intervention, some ulterior plan with our personal gain at its core.
Because if everything did happen for a reason, how do we explain atrocities such as the Holocaust or slavery or childhood cancer or the attacks on the Twin Towers on 9/11 or the massacre of indigenous populations or natural disasters such as the 2005 Tsunami or the murder of young innocent women in Melbourne over the past months or the fire that destroyed my friend’s house? It is a long list of life events that do not fit this explanation, this neatly packaged version of reality of palatable sound bites and rose-coloured distortion. Someone once said to me that the people affected by the 2005 Tsunami must have done something karmically to cause their predicament, because 'everything happens for a reason.'
Sometimes the Universe is simply random.
Sometimes things happen for no particular reason.
Perhaps a better way of thinking is captured in the question,
“How may we be better empowered to live more authentically knowing that randomness and chaos are as much a part of our world as 'reason' and everything supposedly happening because of it?”
This allows us the capacity to cultivate better ways to deal with the challenges we face in our lives and the challenges we face collectively in our shared world.
This is something I've written about in both my first and second books and something I am again tackling in my latest one. When we talk or write about challenging subject matter, it can help start or continue shared dialogue. And for anyone who suffers in silence or behind a veil of invisibility, open dialogue can be life-saving. If having those difficult conversations can help even one person who feels belittled, invisible, dismissed, marginalised, misunderstood and sometimes even blamed for their misfortune rather than the warmth of empathy in her social circle, then surely the difficult conversations are worth it?
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