The Truth About Healing and Loss

I really dislike it when people say, "Everything happens for a reason."
They're usually trying to be profound (or smug, or lazy), but that's like saying, "Everything is composed of matter."
So what?!  How is that supposed to be of any real comfort or significance at this moment?

When someone says that, all I hear is a less honest variation of, "I have no idea what the possible explanation could be for why this happened."  And also possibly, "I'm actually just comforting myself that this recent traumatic event is not a sign that life is more unpredictable than I would like to admit.  So let's turn off our brains now, as insurance."  Or maybe even, "You must somehow deserve whatever happened."

My intention is not to be negative or fatalistic - it's simply to be realistic, awake.  Because life is unpredictable and unfair, so pretending it's not seems like ignoring half of what the experience of living is about!  Like walking through life without peripheral vision, or something... wouldn't you miss a lot?  A dismissive, "Everything happens for a reason," seems to chalk adversity up to some whim of the gods that we don't need to concern our little selves about.  It absolves us of any responsibility (or opportunity) to recognize the significance of this experience for ourselves, personally.

No, we can't necessarily divine the cause of any particular event, but we do have the opportunity to choose to define what it means for us.  And if we don't do that, we're just sleepwalking, aren't we? Nobody wants to experience pain, but we know that from time to time it's unavoidable.  So if, from time to time, experiencing pain is part of what it means to be alive - why not try to get something out of it? Because, dammit, if I have to suffer, I might as well look for some kind of bloody value in the experience...

I vastly prefer how the heroic Augusten Burroughs looks at it.
His wise words (possibly because they are hard-won?) really are comforting.
[Emphasis mine.]


"Heal is a television word.
It's satisfying to see somebody who has gone through adversity and come out the other side, healed.
That's almost word for word, how they might introduce a segment on healing on a talk show. 'Come out the other side.'  Like a tunnel.

But here's the thing: there are some things in life from which you do not heal.
The tunnel never ends.  There is no other side of it.

...

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful.  But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not.  This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

...

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost.

And loss is not a subtraction.  As an experience, it is an addition.

Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there's not less of us but more.  Human experience weighs more than human tissue."

- Augusten Burroughs / 'How to Be'

Craig Cutler