We keep wanting to believe that "everything happens for a reason." I don't see it that way. I think that things happen. Sometimes for a reason, sometimes not. Often, the causes of life events are so complex that we can't know all the reasons or sometimes any of them.
I have a problem with people saying to someone who's lost a child to cancer, for example, that "everything happens for a reason." This kind of statement is not only meaningless, it's grossly insensitive. Telling a bereaved parent that there's a "reason" that their child died is tantamount to saying that it was for the best. Believe me, this is not what the parent is feeling right now. What the parent needs isn't platitudes, but true compassion: acknowledgment of their loss & expressions of sympathy.
While a husband is helplessly watching his beloved wife fight a possibly losing battle with cancer, he really doesn't want to hear that this tragedy is happening "for a reason." He wants caring & support right now, nothing more.
I think that certainly we can choose how we deal with tragedy & loss: we can let it destroy us or we can use it to deepen as human beings. Still, what is this need to make sense of everything? It's better if we simply learn to tolerate the fact that a lot of life just doesn't make sense. Things are random, frustrating, often unfair & always out of our control.
Proponents of "New Age" thinking want to tie up life into a nice bow: sanitize our chaotic, brutal existence & make everything part of a grand plan. Instead, I suggest that we learn to accept that life is often incomprehensible & full of suffering. We can do this if we trust in our own resilience & our capacity to learn & grow from painful situations.
Without having to make sense of everything we can be confident in our strength & our wisdom, & perhaps then we can turn some of life's lemons into lemonade.
Last week I took a mini-vacation. I didn't go any where. I accomplished very little. I escaped quietly into computer games and doing as little as possible. Chatting with a very special friend I said out loud how the only way to get a break from PTSD is to go nowhere and do nothing. Some people from the outside would view this as depression, perhaps it is. All I know that to get a break I sometimes turn to mind numbing nothingness. I don't read my friends' blogs, I only go to very familiar places, and basically hibernate from the world. PTSD is very much like diabetes, it is always with you and following strict rules you can get a break from the symptoms but that existence is so limited.
I like this quote from Ruthless Compassion. I like her agreeing with me that sometimes terrible things just happen by the luck of the draw. I don't believe it is targeted. I don't believe that I got cancer because I was sexually abused. I don't believe that the pedophile hated me or not I was just convenient. I do believe that I can take whatever shit is thrown at me and turn it into fertilizer to become my best self. I do believe that I don't need to stay down in the well and be buried. (Shake it off and step up.) I do believe that when I pray for protection it may not happen. (Sometimes it does.) I do believe that Heavenly Father sent me here to Earth knowing full well that really horrible things can and would happen. I do believe that God loves us and sent his Son Jesus Christ to teach us a better way to treat each other, a better way to live and love. I do believe that I am never alone in my struggle that at any time I can pray kneeling or not. The Holy Ghost, Comforter, Spirit of God can and does whisper in my heart that I matter and I am loved. Humans are just messy. My best vacations from PTSD is resting in Christ. After a break, His expectation is for me to move forward again, helping others as I go, and trusting that my experiences can be turned into something good by what I do with it. Yup, shit makes great manure after being spread thin and mixed with soil then planting seeds of compassion, strength, understanding, and all other good things. (By the way, I happen to love dandelions.)
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