Not Everything Happens for a Reason

Ever have one of those days where you just have to believe you’d been better off if you had just kept your head underneath the pillow? Sure you have, we all have. Life is full of cycles of ups and downs – you just have to know that when the down cycle has you down for an extended period of time – you have to dig down even more for that SUPER PEOPLE STRENGTH.

Even worse… let’s say you’re in one of those moments and your dear friend Sally or Jack comes along and repeats the words “Well, everything happens for a reason!” or “You’ll just have to find the blessing in this.” Some of us might like to believe that things do have a reason for occurring, especially when the incident has caused us actual loss or psychological distress. Yet there may actually be no existential rhyme or deeper reason behind a specific event, beyond any logical or fact-based explanations. Accidents might happen because people are careless or because of miscommunication, just to name a few person-specific causes. Other causes might be due to machine error, poor planning, unexpected changes in the weather, and so on. Asserting that a bad thing happened to a good person because a life lesson needed to be learned does not seem fair to the “student” or the “teacher.”

Not Every Setback in Life has a Divine Purpose

Several decades ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, in which he explored the desire to comprehend the meaning of these types of events. Unfortunately, there is really no easy way to make sense of the “why,” but that does not preclude an individual’s efforts to find a “purpose” or “meaning” of an event in his life. After surviving imprisonment in a German concentration camp, Victor Frankl went on to write the bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning. He noted that people can generally stand any “how” they encounter in life, if they can just determine the “why.” Believing that the misery we experience is a part of the process necessary to reach a goal can provide us with the strength necessary to keep moving forward. Frankl believed that individuals who gave up on their future were likely to die before freedom arrived. They were giving up the fight as if they had lost their reason to live.

Today we will focus on turning that misery into hope, along with actionable steps you can take in your own life to thrive – when it seems at the moment you’re lucky to survive. There is always HOPE my friends. Just make sure that you’re not at the airport if your ship does arrive in port…. 🙂 I’m wishing you the grandest of years with much success and happiness!