Flying Thoughts Terrible Things Happen for a Reason

My flying thought for today; terrible things happen for a reason.

You’ll have heard the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’. When you’re going through a hard time, it will likely be the first thing you say to yourself. Personal experience tells me that there’s nothing more irritating than somebody saying this phrase to you when you’re in the midst of something terrible, so why do we say it to ourselves?

The answer is simple: when we’re going through something shit, we need to convince ourselves it's for a reason, or what’s the point? Consider this… My mental health struggles led to me overhauling my approach to business. It thrust me into the realm of person-centred, human-centred, business. Until you experience mental health struggles, it can be near-impossible to understand what somebody else is going through. This made me feel somewhat better. Through my difficulties, I could empathise with others. There’s my reason.

When you face something terrible, something that shakes your world to the core, it can be easy to fall into the thought pattern of ‘life isn’t fair’. And you’re right, sometimes the bad things that happen to us can feel like they’re not for any rhyme or reason. But, maybe there doesn’t have to be a big cosmic reason as to why things happen. Maybe the reason something terrible happened to you is to show you that you can cope with whatever life throws at you. Maybe there’s a lesson in there. The phrase, ‘one door closes and another door opens’ is one I believe in with every fibre of my being.

Of course, I would never suggest that events such as wars, pandemics, and the like, are positive events. That’s not the point I’m getting at. What I want to communicate, in this roundabout way, is that even from the most terribke events in our life, we can gain something positive. Do the positives justify the negatives? I suppose that depends on the ‘terrible thing’ we’re talking about.

Perhaps it’s down to us to find the reason behind events in our lives that we’d rather not have happened. Just because we find a reason, a positive, does not mean that we’re happy an event happened to us, but it means that we have gained something from it. While you might never be able to look back at something that happened to you with gratitude, maybe you’ll get to a point where you can appreciate what you gained from it? You’ll find the silver-lining hidden behind the dark clouds.

So, yes, my hot-take, my flying thought, for today is that terrible things happen for a reason. And the reason is down to us to find. A new perspective, a new appreciation, an increase in resilience, whatever the reason might be, you can take something positive from everything that happens to you. It’s down to you to find what the positive is.