This week I find no reasons
I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed a stack of people have taken to the curious, quasi-spiritual belief that there’s divine logic behind every haphazard, unfortunate occurrence – from receiving three parking tickets in three days, to getting cancer.
Your girlfriend leaves you? It happened because your true soul mate is just around the corner.
You got robbed? You needed to let go of your attachment to possessions.
I met someone recently who missed her plane. “Oh, it happened for a reason,” she said. She reasoned she was meant to be stuck at the airport for four hours to meet her future husband. I know – totally unreasonable! But there she sat, at the gate lounge, scrutinising every man with a pulse who walked past.
We used to call such things bad luck. And move on. But now, “everything happens for a reason”. Have you noticed this, too?
Not that I make this pronouncement from a lofty pulpit. I say this kind of thing all the time. I got quite unwell at the end of 2007. Once all the doctors failed to give a medically watertight reason, I donned my alternative goggles and went diving for a deeper, metaphysical one. I mean, why me? Why now? There must be a reason under all these layers of onion. Was it bad karma? Or did it all go down to teach me a lesson. I’d been living my life unconsciously and without heart – working dumb hours, drinking too much red wine, running from relationships – and this was “the universe’s way” of getting me to amend my erroneous ways (people who think “everything happens for a reason” generally bring “the universe” into things at some point).
But what if there is no reason – logical, medical or cosmically ordained? What if it just is what it is? Or, as the bumper stickers used to say, “shit happens”. It’d be sweet bloody relief, would it not?
