Friday, October 26, 2012

"Everything Happens for a Reason"

I see these pins and posts everywhere about remembering that everything happens for a reason, and I want to reach out and shake the poor lost people who post them. No, no, stop cheating yourself! Stop expecting some bearded dude in the sky to plan out your life for you and make all the hard decisions for you and turn the hard things into part of some big plan for you.

You need to take responsibility for your own choices and your own desires. And you know what? Shit happens. Really, Forest, it does. And there is no celestial reason behind the shit that life will fling at you. And it will be awful and hurtful and hopefully it won't last too long. And then maybe you'll look back on it and mold it into something that fits the paradigm that you have chosen to explain your life. You will look back and invent reasons why it's better this way, why it had to happen like this, what you were supposed to learn from it. But really, unless it teaches you how to more efficiently pick your ass up off the ground the next time life backhands you, it will do you no real good. You, and you alone, are responsible for your life choices.

If you are the master of your destiny (up to a point, see previous paragraph regarding shit-happens) then spending your days waiting for someone else to confirm your decisions--or worse yet, make them for you--is pathetic and asinine and dangerous. It is an excuse for you not to do hard things, take scary risks, and accept the full weight of your own stupid decisions and failures. Either way, you make bad decisions and you totally fail. You fail because you are not as good at something as you want to be. You fail because someone else is better at it than you are. You fail, because you fail. Not because some divine weirdo waved his magic hands around and aligned the cosmos to make your failure inevitable. You failed, dude. You just failed.

(PS. This doesn't mean I don't believe in God. It just means I don't need Him to tell me which shoes to wear today. Or to convince me that my coworker is a tool "for a reason".)

2 comments:

Heather said...

What? No way! You're saying it wasn't God that tripped me and made me lose the Miss Utah pageant? That was totally supposed to happen for a reason. First he made me do the pageant so that I could learn a lesson about never doing pageants because how else could I have possibly learned that? Then he made me lose because I needed to lose so that I could lose, and that by losing I could learn to lose because really, it was a win at losing, because if I'd won, then I wouldn't have thised and thated that I needed to do.

Still and all, I'm glad I read this because I feel like you wrote it for a big cosmic reason, and that I needed to read it today. It was like a voice in my head saying read this post. And I did. And it changed my life. I can't even imagine WHAT my life would have been like if I had not read this post. So just, thank you.

But also, thank you for the awesome trip through the Ren Fair. You and your Scottish pirate husband are amazing.

Cathlin said...

Oh you are so welcome, Heather. I felt truly inspired to write this post and just knew it would reach the right ears!