Everything Happens for a Reason
An influencer I am only slightly jealous of posted recently about taking responsibility. She said that only after she took full responsibility for everything in her life, did she start to see the manifestations of her full potential. This is a concept I am familiar with. It’s a concept I’ve taught. It’s a concept I, for the most part, agree with. But I’d be lying if I said it felt like the truth in the wake of my husband’s death. Something about this premise seems off, so I decided to unpick it further.
The truth is, I lost my taste for creating what I want. Manifestation used to be one of my passions. Since I was 17 and first learned the basic principles of how our thoughts, feelings, and actions participate in giving ideas physical form, I felt I was remembering something my soul knew and had forgotten. Merging this idea with my lifelong dedication to learning the intricacies of the experience of having a physical human body was natural and inspiring. But after my husband died. None of that seemed relevant. In fact, I now find myself gratefully on the opposite side of the spectrum.
The most challenging moments in my grief journey are when I think about what should or shouldn’t be happening. That my boys “shouldn’t” have to grow up without their father. That I “shouldn’t” have to face the world’s challenges alone. That my husband “shouldn’t’ have died so young. The moments I deny reality and try to superimpose some selfish notion of how the universe should operate are the moments of deepest pain - Imagine the struggle of trying to get the earth to spin the other way and the pain and self-loathing that would follow if your inability to do so was the proof of your inadequacy. Fighting nature, fighting the way things are, is an endless battle that ends in inevitable heartbreak.
What you want to happen is insignificant in the flow of a multiverse comprised of everything, everywhere, all at once. The true secret to “manifestation” is not trying to create what we want but instead getting quiet enough to listen to the clues of what the universe wants and surrendering to its desires. Sometimes the universe’s nudges feel like spontaneous desires; sometimes, they are lifelong callings that keep hitting us over the head when we are too ignorant or too fearful of acting on them. The only thing we can be responsible for in this premise is how open we are to listening to the flow of nature. I am not responsible for my husband’s death, but I was responsible for appreciating the divinity and preciousness of our short time together. I was not responsible for my husband’s death, but I am responsible for accepting what losing him means for myself and our boys.
This understanding brings me to the title of this post, “Everything happens for a reason”: one of the cliche things you don’t want to say to someone who is grieving. But honestly, understanding what this truly means has given me great comfort. Maybe it needs a re-phrase; everything happens in accordance with nature. Everything happens, exactly as it happens, in the symphony of this matrix. We label it good or bad, but it is greater than logic. It’s greater than the pixelation of our thinking brains. This means that everything, including our struggle to create what we want out of the world, happens just as it should, and our only responsibility is to be aware of it.
It is my responsibility to bring my awareness to the mindless numbing. It is my responsibility to bring my awareness to the consistent thoughts of self-doubt and realize that just because they are consistent doesn’t make them true. My only responsibility is to turn my attention to the primordial purity of all that was, is, and ever will be. To turn my awareness to the fact that everything is as it is, and though it may be painful, it is just as it should be. In this way, I am responsible for only the realization that I, and everything else I experience, is merely an individualized expression of Universal Truth, neither inherently existent nor non-existent, and that is all the reason or responsibility needed.