Life is unpredictable. Sometimes I can get myself convinced that life is plannable, that things are somewhat within my control. And maybe some of those things are within my control. But there are the trump cards that are uncontrollable. The accidents, the layoffs, the falls, the injuries….the list goes on.
Often I will hear people say something akin to, “This wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Or “This was never supposed to happen.” But I argue that it was. Now I’m not making an argument for predestination or any other spiritual argument. My thoughts on spirituality need to be addressed in an altogether different place and time. My argument for why this particular thing was supposed to happen is that it did happen. It happened. Plain and simple. I don’t think one can make the argument that something that actually and truly happened was not supposed to happen. It literally just happened.
Now it comes back to control. Do we think that we can control every little thing that happens? If I’m being honest, I do. Somewhere deep down I believe that I have control over every single thing that happens to me. I know in my head that this cannot be the case, but in my heart I believe it to be true. When bad things happen, as they do to everyone, I rack my brain and relive the experience over and over to find a way that I could have prevented it. I kick myself for my actions (or lack thereof). This actually causes me to second guess each decision ahead of time, knowing that it might result in something terrible. Leaving for a trip might result in a plane crash; leaving for a vacation might mean a car accident; going biking might mean getting hit by a car. This kind of fear can paralyze me. It can keep me from living your life.
Then when the bad things happen (as they often do at times that you didn’t even think they might), I use that as proof that I should be more cautious, take fewer chances. My dad used to say when I would get scared of certain things happening that I could just go lie down in a room with black tape over my eyes on an inside wall and moan. He always claimed to have a friend that actually did this (I am not certain that this is true, but nothing would really surprise me). That is what life gets reduced to, isn’t it, when we fear anything?
The choice I always come back to is enjoying life and accepting what happens in life. Not ruminating on those choices, looking back to see where I went wrong. Maybe nothing that happens to us is wrong or bad or “shouldn’t have happened” – it all simply is.
