I used to tell people, "Everything happens for a reason." But I don't know if I believe that anymore.
I'm not saying that to be cynical. Lots of times, things do seem to happen for a reason: a bad thing happens, and then something better comes along in its wake. You get your heart broken, you meet the love of your life. You miss out on a sale, you find cuter shoes (cheaper!) the next day. Your car breaks down, and while you're waiting for the tow truck you encounter a little lost girl whom you return to her teacher who invites you to a lecture that convinces you to go back to school and become a doctor ... and then one day you cure cancer.
Whenever a friend had an obstacle thrown up in their life, I would tell them, "Things happen for a reason," and they would tend to agree. And things would always turn around. See? The universe was telling them something, and that was that life wasn't random, and that events in their life had a purpose.
But this year's been a rough year, and not just for me. And at some point I wondered, do things happen for a reason? What reason was that supposed to be, anyway? And did I mean it when I used to say it, or was it just a way to provide comfort at times when there was nothing else to say?
Things happen for a reason if you believe that there's a deity or a force making sense of our lives, guiding us on a path toward our better selves. It's nice to think that that exists. Some people believe it, and I envy them that -- I wanted to believe, every time I said the phrase. It was, perhaps, my last hopeful grab at agnosticism. But if your faith in a universal power is less certain, then you start to wonder ... a bad outcome isn't always followed by a good one. Death isn't always followed by birth. That winning lottery ticket you accidentally destroyed in the washing machine isn't always replaced by one for an even bigger jackpot. (Man, how I wish that were true.) (Note: I have never put a winning lottery ticket in the washing machine. I just wish I would win the lottery.)
Each bad thing that's happened this year hasn't then been followed by something better that's corrected the course of my life and explained everything. And in one of my darker moments, I thought with startling clarity, everything doesn't happen for a reason. It just happens.
But -- and you knew there was a "but," didn't you? C'mon, I'm not that depressing -- even if things don't happen for a Reason, they still lead you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. If I hadn't lost my job, I might still be stuck in a bad situation. I wouldn't have taken an extended West Coast trip and traveled to Portland for the first time. (And I wouldn't have found nirvana at Powell's, or bought Geek Love there, and dug it for all its twisted glory.) I flirted with upending my life and moving to Chicago, which is an impulse I never would have had normally.
If I hadn't been temporarily homeless, I wouldn't have spent quality time being an aunt to Annah's two kids. Moving to a smaller place is forcing me to downsize, which is ... well, if not a good thing, then an intriguing challenge. I now have a funny story to tell about a dead mouse and a fistful of hair and a refrigerator full of McDonald's McNuggets sauce. I'm learning how to hustle, how to network, how to ask people for help. I'm learning how to cope. And I've received an extraordinary amount of support this year, which continues to touch and amaze me.
Do all those things counterbalance the bad in a way that makes sense of my life? Not exactly. But they're still interesting things, different things that shape my world in some way, large or small. And someday when I look back on this year, they will count, too.
So do things happen for a reason? Somewhere along the line I may have lost my shaky faith that the universe is looking out for us, that A follows B on a soothing, course-correcting path. Maybe it's all random after all. But that doesn't make it pointless. Everything happens, and it leads to something else, and then something else. It turns and turns again, and you'll look back and you'll say, that was my life, that was all of it: the high and the middle and the low, the thing that happened after the other thing, the time I was down and the time I got back up again. Things happen for a reason, and that reason is life.
