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Does everything happen for a reason?
This may be a cliché quote but there is a whole philosophy of fatalism behind it. This sounds bad, granted, but it does not make it so. Fatalism has a lot to do with the belief that, somehow, everything that happens to us is planned in advance. Everything has a meaning even if we, at the particular moment it happens – aware of it or no – do not see the big picture that is intended.
Everything is a sign; everything has a meaning at a particular point in time; everything is planned for us without us having a say in it. That is a horrible concept/philosophy, especially when life gets so hard that all hidden meaning lose their purpose since they have long become unreachable.
For argument sake, let’s stick to our “little” lives and get blind to all others for just a minute; how many things happened that you did not like and yet, you love where you are today? I know I have had a list stored in the back of my brain for some time now. Okay… the minute’s gone!
Let’s take a look at the world and the bigger picture I mentioned earlier. I read an article the other day that made me think for the rest of it. It was in a British newspaper and it talked about a bird-species that was about to become extinct in Africa. For what I remember, Africa had not yet been touched by any bird-species’ extinction: big deal, you should say. The writer looked then at the bigger picture. All the species that disappeared since mankind. Spooky, right!
Anyway, he was also talking about all the people involved to protect the Liben lark (name of the bird). Suddenly he pondered and wondered, or maybe he stated his belief that, mankind was on Earth to utterly destroy it, so how come some of us cared so much to protect it? What difference did it make? Was there a reason for all this?
Fatalism can really be a mood dampener. I wrote a free verse poem in 2005 called “Watch the signs” where I say to be on the look out because the next step is facing us and we often miss it – or is it always that we do. I do not know how right or wrong I was, but I learnt not to see signs everywhere, nor look for them in everything. I learnt with experience that fatalism can be the key to disaster in most cases; it can also kill hope in weak hearts… it almost destroyed MY freewill – which is (could be) an illusion for the fatalist.
In the end, I am a little bit of a fatalist with a big dose of optimism. What about you?
