Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

“Everything happens for a reason”

It’s a cliche as old as time itself and something that is thrown around both by friends who want to make loved ones feel better and on social media in scripty fonts over perhaps a peaceful mountain background.

The background makes it more believable, obviously.

“Everything happens for a reason” is also something that kinda triggers me mainly because it doesn’t mean what people want it to mean and I think that throwing it around as a statement to help when things go wrong isn’t actually helpful.

Maybe I’m just grumpy and too logical, read on and you can decide.

It’s ok, everything happens for a reason.

Let me start by agreeing wholeheartedly with the expression written in its literal form, yes I agree everything does happen for a reason.

For example, the Dunblane Massacre happened for the reason that a psycho decided to shoot up a primary school.

Hurricane Katrina happened because specific weather patterns occurred creating “the perfect storm” which then obliterated a huge amount of New Orleans.

Someone’s partner cheating on them with multiple people might happen because they’re a narcissist who doesn’t or can’t care about anyone else’s feelings but their own.

Wonderful, we’ve established that things happen because something causes them, don’t we all feel better now?

Hopefully, my overly sarcastic tone has come through as you’re reading this.

Of course things happen for a reason, in fact it would be pretty impossible for things to happen without a reason.

What people really mean when they say “everything happens for a reason” is “this horrible event will shape your life in a way which means your life is better because of it”.

I think I’m correct when I say that’s what people are trying to get across when they say it.

If you’re a person that says “everything happens for a reason” does that mean you’d say it in every circumstance?

Someone’s lost their child, someone has been paralysed, someone’s been told they have 6 months to live.

If everything happens for a reason are you going to say it to them in that instance.

I hope the answer is no.

Not everything that comes into your life comes with a benefit

I’ll say that again in case you weren’t listening.

Not everything that comes into your life has a benefit.

Whilst this sounds horribly negative it is actually just horribly accurate.

Fairly recently, at the time of writing, there was a cable car accident in Italy in which 14 of the 15 occupants of the cable car died.

The one survivor is a 5 year Israeli boy who I believe has lost all of his close blood relatives.

There is not a single benefit of this happening to him.

I don’t understand how you even begin to process such a tragic and catastrophic incident – my guess is one day or perhaps even one hour at a time.

There is nothing on earth that you could give me to try and convince me to tell that boy that everything happens for a reason.

This is a situation where the only thing you can do is hug someone and say “this is really shit”

I appreciate that my point is a little extreme but I’m hoping you’re understanding where I’m coming from.

Let’s bring it back to a more common real life example.

Things that feel bad can be right for you

Break-ups are rarely anything but emotional and when one person ends things and the other person wants to keep things going it can feel pretty awful.

Things feel up and down, there’s inner conflict, there’s questioning why, there’s wondering what is wrong with you, there’s so much raw emotion.

However, taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, do you really want to be in a relationship with someone who has decided they don’t want to be with you?

Is that really going to serve you and make you feel good?

Once one half of a couple has decided they no longer want to be in the relationship does it stand a chance of working again?

Possibly with couples counselling but would the person choosing to end it want to engage in such a thing?

This is a situation in which people are likely to say “everything happens for a reason” in this instance is likely to really mean “further down the line you’ll realise that you were better off not in this relationship and you’ll find someone else who makes you feel happier”.

Which is akin to “there’s plenty more fish in the sea”.

So if someone says “everything happens for a reason” in this instance they’re probably correct, but is it actually a helpful thing to hear?

It isn’t as if this isn’t some wild out of the blue thing, it’s about as cliché as it comes and the person saying it is unlikely to be the first person to have said it.

So, where does that leave us? Other than you thinking I’m a right grumpy bastard?

You can improve nearly any situation

If you’ve followed anything I’ve written or recorded before then you’ll know that I’m very fond of Stoic philosophy.

One of the major teachings of this is about learning what we can and can’t control in our lives (full blog here)

Perhaps the biggest thing to come out of this is that we cannot control what has already happened in our lives.

Once things are in the past they are set in stone.

Our choice becomes whether to accept these things or to bitch, moan and complain about them for months and years after they’ve happened.

It is within this acceptance (also a full blog here) that you’ll find my ethos on the nature of “everything happens for a reason”.

It’ll never make it onto an inspirational mug but…

“Anything can happen and there could be a positive reason for it.
If there isn’t then accept the situation and make the best of it.
If there is, receive it gratefully and make the best of it.”

Not exactly snappy but it’s accurate – in my opinion.

***TRIGGER WARNING – SUICIDE – SKIP TO NEXT SET OF ASTERISKS TO AVOID***

In April of 2016 I lost one of my best friends to suicide, it was completely out of the blue, there were no warning signs or anyone worrying about him in that capacity.

One minute I was planning a day out with my family, the next I’m getting a call from a friend informing me of the awful news which nearly made me actually sick, bawling my eyes, punching a wall and being more speechless than I’ve ever been in my life.

I can clearly and honestly say that if anyone, particularly in the first year after my friend’s death, told me that “everything happens for a reason” I would have punched them in the throat.

That expression has, in my opinion, no place being said around any serious life events.

Death is final, so without putting too cruel a point on it, once my friend had passed he was gone and that was that.

(As a side note I’m going to mention that I’m not going to get into grief and its stages here)

I then had to decide how to move on with my life, I had to find a way of creating something even 1% positive out of what had happened.

My friend’s death had the result of making my friendships/bonds with mutual friends of his stronger.

Although stronger bonds are a good thing, you could never say it balances out against what we all went through to get them.

I did however decide what I had to do to try and “make the best of it”.

And so it was that 3 months after his death I decided to share my own story online about my self-harm and suicide attempts. 

I tried to encourage people to open up about how they were feeling and to show their friends that when they said “I’m here for you” they knew it wasn’t just a platitude.

My hope was that it might reach at least one person at the right time and made them change their mind or reach out.

And it worked, the video was shared thousands of times and received a small amount of press coverage.

I received messages from people telling me that it had helped them open up about how they were feeling to their friends and loved ones.

It could be the case that someone would say well that was the reason for your friend’s death, to make you share your own story.

But it was honestly something I was considering doing anyway so at best it accelerated that happening and just made sharing my story an even more emotional experience.

******************END OF TRIGGER***************

But that’s the bottom line of going through anything.

Accept it and then make the best of it, even if what has happened to you is truly and powerfully heart-breaking.

Choosing how to receive words.

Let’s be clear.

No-one is going to stop saying “everything happens for a reason”, particularly if they’re the sort of person who believes in karma and the universe liking to even things out.

And to be honest all they’re really trying to do is make you feel better so it’s always going to be coming from a place of kindness.

Plus going back to “control” you never actually get to decide what someone says to you, only how you receive it.

This is obviously true in all circumstances.

So the next time someone says “everything happens for a reason” you can choose to take the meaning from that however you choose to.

Someone said it to me recently and although the expression irks me somewhat I decided to let it serve as a reminder to accept it and make the best of the situation.

What I strongly advise against when hearing it is letting yourself think that you can just be lazy thinking that the universe/God/anyone else is going to make the benefit of whatever has happened just fall into your lap.

So, although it isn’t in anyway snappy:

“Anything can happen and there could be a positive reason for it.
If there isn’t then accept the situation and make the best of it.
If there is, receive it gratefully and make the best of it.”

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