What’s It Mean, Alfie?—Part 2

Driving down the road one day, I was almost involved in an accident. Had I been driving one mile per hour faster or slower, things could have been entirely different. I may either be dead or not even know I could have had a close call. Someone buys a lottery ticket and wins big money. A ticket purchased just before or after that winning one lost. A gust of wind blows down a tree in my yard and just misses the house. Were any of these events predictable? Could they have been foreseen? Even in the aftermath, can we attribute any causal factor to them? Mightn’t it be a copout to say, “Well, I guess God didn’t want my number to come up just then”?

Sure, for many of the things that happen to us, we can connect the dots and see a causal relationship with something that happened earlier. I possibly wouldn’t have luckily avoided that car accident if I had been driving faster. If I had cut down all the trees around me, I could have avoided them being blown down on my house. If she hadn’t even bought that lottery ticket, she’d have had no chance of winning.

So we have a tendency to seek meaning in things when there often is none. Unforeseen events don’t have to have some law governing them or some significance to them. Why was I born who I am and in the circumstances I was? Why was I not born into a starving family in Africa? Why was I born with this birth defect? Is there any reason for these happenings? Why can’t they just be?

The story of Job comes to my mind when I ponder these things. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or the opposite question: Why do some bad people get away with their evil activities? Is there no justice in this world? We want all the loose ends to be tied up in the final scene of our life—as in a Hollywood movie. We want meaning; we demand accountability.

That attitude can lead to a lot of angst and anger—emotions that can often be avoided by simply accepting what is. If we give up the demand to know why things happen and accept not always knowing; if we can live with the mystery, we can unburden ourselves of a lot of trouble. Rather than fret over how or why something just happened—as we sit transfixed with either horror or glee—we might better put our attention and energy into intelligently responding, before the next contingency comes along and smacks us upside the head unawares.

I’m by no means arguing that we should simply believe life is one random event after another, and that we have no control over it. It’s a balance. It’s a paradox, even. Somewhere between life having no meaning (no reason, no purpose, or concluding it’s random) and its every detail being planned and caused by some external power, is a happy balance where I dance with life and make the most of the great mystery.