What if things don’t happen for a reason?
Taking personal responsibility
The expression, ‘everything happens for a reason’ makes my toes curl. Especially when it is uttered with a helpless shrug of the shoulder and the underlying subtext of ‘moving on’. What if things don’t happen for a reason and that there is no deeper meaning.
Endless analyses and reflections will often present reasons why something has happened. Reasons that change over time as more information becomes available and more voices are heard. And when a greater context is revealed, the more objective historians take over from the polarised pundits. We live in a world where shit happens, and even if we managed, after a long process, to attribute meaning to it, some events will, forever, remain unreasonable.
On an individual level, part of my work is to be a kind of psychological pundit or historian. When a client presents with an issue, we strive to understand why the issue developed, which self-part or defence mechanism got triggered. We may start as pundits, seeing two opposing parts, the survival-self standing in opposition to the denied-self. As more voices in the system are allowed to come to the fore, a more objective narrative develops, helping us to understand cause and effect.
What’s the point?
Sometimes clients don’t see the point of exploring the effect of, for example, a parent’s insecurity. Even though it may explain their own overly responsible attitude to life, or, conversely, their life anxiety. How does that help, they ask? What’s done is done, they say. No point blaming someone who is already fragile enough. And they are right, because only the worst kind of therapy is about blame. This historical framing in therapy is not intended to find blame, nor, at first, will it offer some reasonable meaning. However, understanding and insight can be the first step to finding the internal freedom to bring change.
A healthy collective investigation into why things are the way they are, shouldn’t be about blame either. It should also be focussed on the spot where you can see the pattern, listen to all the voices, even those you deem stupid, taboo or irresponsible. In order to see cause and effect you need to have the full picture. Only then you can make the changes to steer yourself or your community in another direction. Once we have understood the cause and done the hard work of making changes, individually or collectively, might begin to attribute meaning. And that is not the same as trotting out a worn-out phrase and shifting the responsibility onto fate, the gods or the stars in the heavens.
And some things will forever remain unreasonable
Throughout history there have been events, collective and individual, that are so cruel, so unjust, so deeply abhorrent, that no amount of explanation can make it reasonable or justifiable. Nor does it seem possible to attach any kind of meaning to it. Not even at the deepest mystical or spiritual levels.
All around the globe, through the eons, humankind has plundered, killed, erased entire nations, greedily gobbled up land and resources, driven by a need for domination, power and revenge. Neighbour has turned on neighbour, so many times that to list each event would take us beyond the time of the Old Testament or the Mahabharata, leaving each one of us with bloodstained, ancestral hands. So where will it stop? Can it even stop? Each new era in humanity’s history is like an echo of events that have happened before. Some became meaningful and led to change, some were just raw, unjust and cruel.
Seeing this pattern of cruelty as we look back can make us feel like humanity will never learn.
It’s how almost all of us can feel about our own process as we go through a healing journey. After insight and understanding has been achieved, we feel we are healed from our wounds. However, inevitably they come and hit us around the head again, leaving us to despair we didn’t learn a thing. But once we explore the event some more, it soon becomes clear that there is more insight, less loose cannon triggering. The event seems the same but is now actually experienced from a wider context.
Imagine our growthful learning like a path slowly circling its way up a mountain. Each time we go around, we meet the same views, but we see them from a slightly higher, slightly wider perspective. We bring newer and greater insights to the same issue. We stop to remember where we were then, and where we are now.
Can we apply this mountain analogy to the entirety of humanity? How do we get all of us climbing the mountain nation by nation, community by community? And not slipping off the mountain because we’re despairing that the view seemed the same and we now need to go and blame someone, shoot someone, or throw some bombs. How can we find the discipline, collectively, to reflect on the view and see that it is subtly different without forcing the whole of humanity onto the couch?
Perhaps that is a dream. Maybe the collective journey up the mountain can only be the total sum of each individual taking it upon themselves to move from reason to meaning. And that is not done by shrugging your shoulders and saying, ‘there’s a reason for everything’ and moving on. But by doing the hard internal work of creating meaning out of a personal journey through meaninglessness.
One example from living memory shows us there is a way. Mandela persuaded the ANC not to turn the tables on the white minority after he was finally freed from Robbin Island. He used his experience to create a structure where peace was given a chance to grow in favour of revenge or blame. Other, similar Truth and reconciliation commissions have helped heal wounds rather than retaliate for them.
Adversity happens to the best of us and the paradox of life is to let the very experience of meaninglessness create some kind of meaning in our lives, if that is possible. The ‘meaning making’ is down to us, and we can only achieve it if we stop trying to put the responsibility on an external force, be it political, sociological, astrological or divine, or…. our neighbour.
Embracing the adversity, wrestling with it, shaking your fists at the gods, if need be, but taking personal ownership of it and making it count. And when the same challenges face us again at a later stage, remembering what we learned and putting those lessons into practise. In that way we weave the darker threads of life together with those of a lighter hue. And we do this with love, courage and acceptance. And we do it one by one, each for ourselves, taking personal responsibility to heal. Because only through this profound creative existential endeavour can we reflect true humanity in the rich tapestries of our lives as we begin to weave ourselves together into a meaningful and healthy human-wide tapestry that will hold strong as we labour up this mountain that we call life.
Prayer for a troubled world
I was looking through my notes to find a poem that could go with this article and came across a Prayer for a Troubled World that I wrote in 2015. It was definitely a year that my own life turned topsy turvy, but I was finding it hard to remember the world events that led me to write this prayer. Do you?
In 2015 the Syrian civil was in full swing, Syrian refugees were seeking shelter all across the world and the Islamic State, IS, or ISIS had declared itself a caliphate and launched three major terrorist attacks on three continents. And all of that was pre Covid!!!! How easily the tragedies of yesteryear are forgotten through our concerns for this year. How do we hold the memories alive without acting out in revenge or blame?
When I read the poem again, I see my own search for that parallel healing process. The burgeoning belief that my own healing, the only one I can actively take responsibility for, will contribute to a greater healing and a return to the One Being that we all share.
A Prayer for a troubled world
Father Sun and Mother Earth, Spirit of a sacred birth
Show us now our paths to tread and give us courage for what we dread.
Fill our hearts with love so pure that we may heal as we endure.
And healing ourselves one by one, help heal our world and return to One.
Grant that the pattern of Will and Love, through our willing love may sing its song.
Helping us each to look deep inside, retrieving what we tried to hide.
And healing ourselves, one by one, help heal our world and return to One.
(Lysanne Sizoo – 2015 Nederhorst)