When Crap Happens and You Learn Nothing

Everything happens for a reason.

I was in an interesting conversation about this concept recently. Luckily, I was chatting with someone who agrees with me — so there was no awkward difference of opinion on the often sensitive topic of fate.

It’s not something I believe. Bad things happen. Really bad things happen. Horrible nightmares occur. That’s just the way it is. (Great things happen as well, but today I am dwelling on the bad. Good times will be covered in a later post — perhaps after I do some weeping to clear my head.)

The world can be a vicious place and it makes sense that as humans we want to make sense of the senseless. I understand the impulse.

It’s rooted in the belief that everything that happens — both good and bad — is part of a deity’s master plan.

I shudder to think what that master plan is. It’s not going rather well so far.

All we can do is try to learn from the bad hands we get dealt. But sometimes there’s no lesson to be learned.

Yeah, no lesson. But I won’t be writing a self-help book called “When Crap Happens and You Learn Nothing.”

It won’t sell. But it will be true.

Comments

  1. Good point, Sean. It’s not that bad on balance. There are plenty of great things in world. But also much disaster and horror. So it’s going as well as it ever has…And yes, you have not written in long time :). Enjoy your posts and look forward to more my friend.

    I agree with what you said:

    Instead I think that everything that happens to us, on a day to day, moment to moment basis, are learning opportunities. If we pay attention to what we are doing, and what others are thinking and feeling, we have a chance to learn, to change and to grow. And when that moment of attention happens, we often feel that what just happened, must have happened for a reason — it is our rational thinking mind trying to make sense of a flash of insight.

  2. Sean, on the matter of three- figure jeans. I blush to admit three-figures is not as atypical as I’d care to admit. High three-figures, however, was a bridge too far. But they were raw Japanese denim… Still I resisted. I may be a jean lunatic, but resisted!

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