You meet people for a reason, lesson or blessing

I read somewhere that we meet a person for a reason, a season or a lifetime. And as hard as it is to believe, I’ve found that it is true. Although I can’t seem to realise it as soon as that person is out of my life. I tried to hold on, ponder what went wrong, what can be fixed. You meet someone sometimes for a reason, to teach you about something. Perhaps, like me, to show you around an entirely new and vibrant city and show you how much fun you could have and how life is not all about making money but making those moments that you will reminisce about and share with excitement and joy to your close friends over dinner.

You meet someone sometimes for a reason, to be someone that you need exactly at the moment. When fall just slowly turned the leaves brown, when cold just swept in, reminding you of the winter coming ahead. Sometimes you need that person to show you that warmth is all around you, all you have to do is look for it. You need a person to show you that the cold wasn’t so bad and to care about someone without having to be on guard with your heart all the time wasn’t so bad either. That you were capable of actually feeling something, feeling for someone. And no matter how fleeting something is, you should be glad because it happened. That just because it was short, it was true, it was real.

But sometimes as cliché as it might sound, you have to gracefully let go when you realise a person’s presence is done from your book as a chapter. So you don’t close the whole book, but simply turn the page to the next one. And some other times, you meet a person for a lifetime. After all the lessons learned and you’re ready to embark on a fantastic new journey.

What humans do is create meaning. We create meaning after every event. That’s how we seek to understand the world, and it works. When we tell stories, we try to tell a story so that it has a moral. A meaning. It is completely natural that after we have a relationship with someone that we decide what meaning that meeting has for us.

It is easy to confuse meaning-making with reasons that events occur. When we decide the meaning of an event, such as meeting a person, that meaning then provides a reason, after the fact, for meeting that person. Since anyone with a pulse is always trying to figure out what events mean, reasons for those events always appear the instant we know what the event means for us.

Once we have a reason for an event in the past, it can seem like the reason was there before the event happened. Reasons seem timeless, as does meaning. Once we decide the meaning of an event, it seems like the reason for that event must have always been there. Thus, it seems like the event happened for a purpose.

It did have a purpose. It’s just that we only figure out the purpose that something happened after it happened. Once we figure it out, it can seem like the purpose of the event was there before it happened. Of course, events are not predetermined, and we make the choices that guide our actions. Afterwards, we try to figure out why things happened the way they did.

And once we figure that out, we have created the meaning, purpose and reason for that event in our lives. It’s not magic. It’s not like something is planning our lives for us. It is just that all human beings understand things by making them into stories. We make stories because they help us understand things. Once we believe we understand an event, we have created a reason and purpose for the event. We learn what that event has to teach us, and we apply that learning to future events that are similar.

And since we are the ones creating the meaning or reasons, we can tell that story any way we want. The reason can be anything we want. When we create a reason, even though we are the ones creating the reason, it seems like we didn’t create the reason. It seems as if the reason comes from elsewhere, or from something that guides our lives. It seems like the reason was inevitable.

Therefore, it is hard to imagine that someone else experiencing the same events might find a different reason. It is also hard to imagine that we might come up with a different reason for the same event at some later time in life. Yet, both these things happen. Usually we forget the past reason we assigned to an event, or we decide we drew the wrong lesson from the story of the event. It still seems as if the reason is not something we created, but something that comes from outside us. I think this is something interesting about the way humans think. We have multiple parts of our brains, some of which we feel like we inhabit intimately, and some of which we have a much harder time communicating with. Because of the difficulty in becoming aware of what these other parts of our minds are thinking, it can seem like they are different from us.

Why would our minds have different parts, some of which seem like us, and some of which seem to be other than us? It’s just a question, but once it is answered, we will have a reason for the way our brains are made. The words are tricky. I just said “brains are made,” implying agency to the process by which we came to think. However, if the process was evolution, then did evolution plan things? Or did they just happen?

It doesn’t make sense to say evolution planned things. Evolution is just a process. The way we work is the current result of the process. Evolution is the reason for us being the way we are, but there was no planning or consciousness to evolution. I think we are so used to making plans and then enacting them, that we think about other processes in nature as working the same way. But nature doesn’t plan. It just happens. We’re the ones looking for patterns. We survive by recognizing patterns. We try to create patterns. Because we try to do this and succeed at it, it comes to seem that planning is the process by which things happen; by which we control our lives. Cheers!