Is Life A Series Of Coincidences Or Do Things Happen For A Reason?

There was a time when my answer to the question Is Life A Series Of Coincidences Or Do Things Happen For A Reason would have been a hearty no.

I would have told you that we like to look for coincidences, synchronicity and similarities because they make us feel good but there is no reason to believe there is any truth to that.

Serendipity was nothing more than a tool writers could use to make people smile, a trick the fortune tellers used to convince us we didn’t waste the two bits we spent on having our fortunes told.

That was long before the boy who wrote about shutting down his blog read the comments and listened to what was said in the emails that followed.

But even though he had begun to question his position and wondered if it was possible that there were things he didn’t understand going on he still didn’t give in. Didn’t let himself go to places he couldn’t walk upon because the foundation was too weak to stand upon.

He didn’t want to believe.

“Bottom line is, even if you see ’em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”
― Joss Whedon

And he didn’t, not really.

If you had pressed him hard enough he might have conceded it was possible he was wrong, but you would have had to push hard and not given him any space to wiggle and wriggle out of.

That was before he had a dream where someone asked why he thought a hammer is the solution to everything.

It was a good question and astute. That guy figured if he couldn’t open the door he would use the sledge hammer and knock the door down or alternatively bash a large hole in the wall.

Either way he didn’t care because he got where he was trying to go and he figured that sometimes shock and awe were very effective.  Most people didn’t like confrontation and if you made a scene they gave in.

And then he thought about what happened when people tried that with him. He thought about what he would do when he felt attacked and remembered how he would go for the throat because if you came for him it was easier to turn that around and force the other person back upon their heels.

That happened online more than once. People didn’t realize how many cyber footprints they left and when they barged into one of his cyberhomes he took note of their IP addresses and went to visit them elsewhere.

It almost always made them reconsider whether it was smart to confront him because very few were truly ready to deal with the consequences. That Taurus nature when roused made the bull lower his horns and trample the offender.

Time passed and more things happened that forced him to reconsider his position.

Some of them were very difficult moments, the most challenging of his life and as they happened he understood that once those moments had passed he would be a different person than he had been.

Friends and relatives referred to it as a growth period for him but he didn’t respond to their well meaning comments because they didn’t understand. He didn’t hold that against them because he didn’t want any of them to be able to discuss it from personal experience but it was also why he felt like he had almost no one to speak with.

That was almost a relief  because talking about it felt like he was reliving it and there was no upside to it. It hurt just as much going up as it had going down and only reminded him about how powerless he felt to stop it.

Still he conceded that he had learned from it. It had made him harder, tougher and more patient. He was more detailed oriented and understood sometimes shock and awe didn’t work as well.

Sometimes you made notes about people or moments and filed that away to use at a later date.

“We don’t meet people by accident
They are meant to cross our path
for a reason”

The boy turned hard-ass turned inward and thought about the past 11 years and shook his head.  That was because  he realized that an accidental meeting in the most unlikely of places online had turned his life upside down.

A cursory glance from the outside wouldn’t be enough for another to see what he was talking about. An outsider might have made a snap judgement and decided that two people had formed a friendship that had some ups and downs and then talked about how other outside influences had affected them.

But that would be a mistake.

That is because that friendship played a central role in his course correction. It was a fundamental part of what reoriented his focus on life and why he left a career to pursue another.

It made the boy turned hard-ass laugh.

He wasn’t one who was prone to sudden changes in direction. Most of his life had been spent playing it safe or so he had always thought.

Now he looked outside the window and thought about how impermanent things were. He had intentionally disconnected from much of what he had held on to and jumped out of the pan and into the fire.

He did so willingly because he figured that the only way to really make his life into what he wanted required action. If that meant dancing in the fire for a while he would do it because sometimes you can’t get where you are going by anything other than through.

Meaning, if you want to get to the other side you can’t do so by going back and looking for another way around. You can only get there by going through.

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ” ― Joss Whedon

“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?” ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.” ― Paulo Coelho

Some of you may be confused by what you have read. If you read the posts that I linked to above and those I’ll link to in a moment it might make more sense to you, s0me of it.

The best explanation I can offer is I want to be the kind of writer who is fearless. I want to be the one that bares his heart and soul on the page because the raw words aren’t just the most authentic they are the ones that are most likely to catch readers.

“Whispers of insecurity laid siege upon his defenses and left him staggering.”- Wounded By Words

and

“These are not the write words to be typing now. These are not the words that are required by others who sign paychecks and editors who wish to insert them into magazines and websites that would otherwise have holes in them. Instead they are the words of a father…”- The Right Words

one more…

“The words you read here are filled too frequently with the sad, simpering sounds of unhappiness and people don’t like that. Nor do they like it when I fill my screen with kind of light-hearted goofy insouciance that makes some people guffaw and others grumble. I am not supposed to write about religion because I offend too many people when I say Happy Holidays or pepper my posts with Jewish jargon.” –Help Me

Life is more than a series of coincidences. Mind dump complete.

See you in the comments. My thanks to those who take the time to read it all.