David White, MD
Take cheer my friend, everything happens for a reason! Wait—What? Really? Every car accident, job loss, bankruptcy, divorce, broken friendship, injury, cancer diagnosis, loss of a loved one—this and everything else—they happen for a reason? In my work as a physician, I have heard this counsel offered so many times, and always with a sincere hope to believe it is so. I have no doubt it is done with a genuine heart to bring some measure of hope—order from chaos, clarity from confusion and steadiness in turbulence. Perhaps more foundationally it is expressed in effort to introduce tangible borders in the expansive desert of understanding “why” a tragedy has befallen someone. More often, I’m afraid, it serves as an escape-hatch from the discomfort of sitting in someone’s grief and disappointment—perhaps our own. It is offered as an invitation to move our gaze from the pain that is in front of us and redirect our view to some future value born out of this temporary emotional expense. It attempts to move us from seeing our circumstances as a meaninglessness intrusion to a purposeful invitation of discovery and growth.
When more closely considered, “Everything happens for a reason,” is an absurd proposition that an event occurred with its own specific, foreordained intent to create some other benefit for us. Every tragedy and disappointment thus become a riddle to be solved; once solved, then perhaps, our joy or sense of meaning can be restored. Sadly, this hope ushers us too quickly away from the therapeutically necessary expressions of sadness, disappointment, and grief.
Of course, there are ‘reasons’ why things happen. All things happen as a direct consequence of other actions or forces, and then those ‘things’ subsequently have further effect on other ‘things.’ There are many elements of our lives that we can control— when we get up, what we eat, if we exercise, what we say to others—and these have implications for which we often hold each other accountable. We do not typically encourage people for their successes with the sentiment “Hey, everything happens for a reason.” We would more typically offer, “Wonderful, you deserve this, you have worked so hard!” When someone loses a job because they were habitually late for work, we understand this to fall into a definable category of cause and effect. Our counsel would rightly be, “You should be on time with your next job.”
This is also true for things that may not be so clearly attributable to a life choice. When I fall in my living room and break my hip, it was not due to my home and the universe conspiring together to alter, and thus improve my life in some way. It is, however, the expression of a perfect symphony of my chosen action and the physical laws that have existed through all of time, expressed with predictable mathematical precision—the sole of my worn sneakers, now separating from the front of my shoe, catches the edge of a floor-board that has slowly warped and raised due to a water spill long ago. This halts the movement of the foot and leg that was to catch and support the transition of my body’s forward movement forward, as clearly defined by Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion. Gravity then offering the final directional assistance towards the ground. Cause-and-effect, just like that. No conspiring, no riddle, no preordained purpose!
Many of the innumerable expressions of cause-and-effect that occur in our daily lives are predictable—some are intended, some not. It is in the unforeseeable events of our lives that the deeper questions of meaning and purpose are born. We can describe the mechanics of a devastating fall through an examination of physical laws. We can explain cancer through understanding the sequence of cell damage and mutation. We can even grasp the devastating series of events leading a drunk driver to swerve into the oncoming lane of an unsuspecting victim. But nowhere in these tragic events will be found a purpose or reason, because these events intended nothing in and of themselves. Perhaps our inclination to embrace the idea that ‘everything happens for a reason’ is not so much found in our desperation for that reason, but rather in our inherent longing for redemption— a restoring of the value of what was lost.
In his renowned book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes antifragility as, “…beyond resilience or robustness.” He elaborates, “the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and [thus] love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” If antifragility is truly a part of the human experience, as Taleb suggests, then it is ultimately an expression of our potential—a potential that is dependent on our response to adversity over time. It is in that response where the hope of redemption will be found.
Over the course of our lives we come to understand that each day is touched by brokenness. It is with the Psalmist that we lament, “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” This sentiment is by no means the sour conclusion of a pessimist but rather one of simple observation through time. Our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our labor—all touched by decline or brokenness; but not only that. Inherent to our experience of brokenness is that we have an associated longing for all things to be redeemed— value gained or restored— that which we have labeled, ‘reason.’ And true to Taleb’s claim of our antifragility, we do have the potential within us to gain from the ‘shocks’ of this life—to grow in strength and wisdom.
The hope of redemption stirs within us and will over time call us to respond— to grieve and mourn, to seek counsel, to confess, to listen, to forgive, to exercise, to sacrifice, to risk another try or try something new. By our very nature there will be restoration and gain—redemption. It is for this reason that we can sit quietly with those who suffer rather than pressing them out of their pain by suggesting that there is a compelling ‘reason’ for it. Rather, grieve with those that grieve—cry with those that cry. Then in time, as healing, growth, knowledge and wisdom have their effect, we can celebrate the value and beauty of that which was once broken, now redeemed.
