Do things happen for a reason?

There have been times in my life—those times when I feel happy and content—when I have thought that everything has worked out for the best. I may have even thought things had happened for a reason. I suppose it’s comforting, in a way, to think that the direction of your life is out of your hands. We all like the idea of free choice, but what if we screw things up? What if we make the wrong choice and make ourselves miserable? It’s comforting at those moments to believe that there’s a reason for that misery, that it’s all leading somewhere.

But what if it’s not? What if we’ve just made a stupid choice and that’s … it? Then what do we do?

We make a purpose. We say, “I can learn from this,” or “This will make me stronger,” and it often does. It’s important for our sanity to be able to this. We can create great things from our misery, but we can’t say that there’s any purpose to it. There’s no purpose to anything. Life is only one act of coping after another.