Not Everything Happens for a Reason

When something painful happens, we naturally want to know why. We can blame ourselves, somebody else, fate or life itself because somehow having an explanation can feel easier than having none at all. But sometimes the most truthful answer is simply that we don’t know.

I don’t have a problem with the saying everything happens for a reason when it helps us make peace with one of life’s unexpected turns. The job we didn’t get leads somewhere else. A plan falls through and another possibility opens up. Looking back, we sometimes realise that something we thought was a setback changed our direction in ways we are ultimately glad about.

But I would never use that phrase to explain bereavement, serious illness or something that changes a person’s life in ways they would never have chosen. The death of a child is not a lesson. We cannot know why these things happen, and I don’t believe we should try to explain them for somebody else.

I’ve experienced loss myself, some when it was expected and some with no warning at all, and I’ve never found a reason for any of it. The grief was hard, and some of it always will be. Eventually, though, I stopped looking for an explanation. I realised I didn’t need to understand why something had happened before I could begin to find a way to live with what had happened.

So if something has happened in your life that you cannot explain, I’m not going to try to explain it for you. What I can do is share what I’ve found useful when there simply isn’t an answer.

This is where the idea of Earth School needs particular care, and it is the boundary I mentioned at the beginning of this section. We can use our own experiences to learn about ourselves, but that does not give us the right to decide why something happened to somebody else or what they are supposed to learn from it.

Learning Is Not Blaming

I said earlier that almost anything in our everyday lives can become something to learn from. Our relationships, reactions, choices, patterns and beliefs all have something to tell us. That does not mean we caused what happened to us, and finding that one of our own patterns played a part does not make it our fault.

The distinction matters enormously. If I look back and see that I repeatedly ignored my own intuition, stayed too long, or chose from a belief I can now see was limiting me, I have learned something worth having. But I know it now. At the time, I was choosing from what I understood then. Had I been able to see it as clearly as I see it today, I would probably have chosen differently.

That doesn’t remove responsibility for our choices. It removes the need to punish ourselves for not knowing something we had not yet learned. For me, that is one of the most important principles in this section. We can take responsibility for what we see now without blaming ourselves for what we couldn’t see then. Once we know better, we get another opportunity to choose.

We Don’t Cause Everything That Happens

There is one boundary I feel very strongly about. We should never use the idea of Earth School to decide that somebody caused their illness, bereavement, abuse or any other painful experience because they thought the wrong thoughts, held the wrong beliefs or failed to learn an earlier lesson. We simply don’t know that, and we should never presume to know it about somebody else’s life.

People die. Bodies become ill. Accidents happen. Other people make choices that affect us, and much of what happens in life is outside our control. Earth School should never become another reason to blame ourselves or anybody else for suffering.

There may be something we can learn from a painful experience, either at the time or much later. There may also be nothing we can make sense of at all. Both are perfectly valid. Finding something we can learn from what happened is not the same as saying it happened because we needed to learn it.

There are deeper metaphysical teachings which take a different view of cause and effect and suggest that our experiences are connected to our choices at a level we may not consciously understand. How deeply you choose to explore them is entirely up to you. I have explored those deeper teachings myself, but I have also realised that I don’t need to make up my mind about them one way or another to benefit from the idea of Earth School.

What Is Mine and What Isn’t?

The most useful question I have learned to ask is: what part of this is mine? There may be a choice I would make differently now. I may recognise a pattern in my relationships, a belief I have carried for years, or a way I habitually react when I am frightened. That part is useful, because I can do something with it.

There is usually a large also a part of the situation that was never mine. Other people’s choices are not mine. Events I could not have predicted are not mine. Circumstances I could not control are not mine.

Psychologists call this our locus of control: our sense of what is and isn’t within our influence. Believing that outcomes follow from what we do serves us well most of the time, because it is what makes us act rather than wait. Applied to something that was never ours to control, that same instinct produces a guilt which is remarkably hard to shift, and which can feed the kind of self-blame that keeps low mood in place can turn into guilt and self-blame for something that was never ours to carry.

So the work is telling the two apart, and we will not always get it right. Sometimes we won’t know. That is uncomfortable, and it is still a great deal better than carrying something that was never ours in the first place.

When There Is Nothing Left to Work Out

I know how tempting it is to keep going back over something painful, looking for the piece we might have missed. Why did this happen? What should I have done differently? Was there a sign I ignored? What am I supposed to learn from this?

I did exactly that myself not long ago. I recently lost my beloved cat after eighteen years together, and afterwards my mind went into overdrive. Had I made the right decision to end his suffering? Had I left it too long? What if I had given him more time? Why did this have to happen now? I went over and over the same questions, somehow hoping I would eventually arrive at an answer that made me feel better.

After about a week, I realised I wasn’t finding any new answers. I was simply making myself more miserable. So I stopped trying to work it all out and allowed myself to feel the sadness of losing him. I missed him, and it hurt. There wasn’t a lesson I needed to find or an explanation that would make that loss easier. I needed to grieve.

Reflection can help us see something important. But there also comes a point when we are no longer discovering anything new. We are simply going back over the same ground, asking questions that may not have an answer.

I’ve learned to stop looking for a reason behind every loss. That doesn’t make what happened right, fair or meant to be. It means accepting that I may never understand why some things happen.

Sometimes “I don’t know” isn’t an inadequate answer. It is simply the most honest one we have.

What Acceptance Actually Asks

Acceptance is easily misunderstood. Accepting something does not mean saying it was right. It does not mean we wanted it, deserved it, or are grateful it happened. It means recognising that it did happen, and that we cannot go back and make it unhappen.

Sometimes even that is too much to ask, particularly while something is raw. Willingness is enough then, and willingness has always been the only thing any of this asks of us. We don’t have to make peace with what happened today. We don’t have to find the lesson, and we don’t have to be ready to move forward. We can simply be willing to believe that we will not always feel exactly as we feel now.

Remorse, and the Guilt That Outstays It

There will be times when we look back and genuinely wish we had behaved differently. I certainly have. We may have hurt somebody, ignored something important, or made a choice we would not make now. Recognising that is useful. Remorse helps us take responsibility, apologise where it is warranted, make amends where we can, and choose differently next time.

Guilt becomes something else when we use it to punish ourselves repeatedly for what we can no longer change. If I have genuinely learned from something, continuing to condemn the person I was does not make the learning worth any more. I would rather ask what I know now that I didn’t know then, and what I will do differently because I know it. That is a question we can actually act on.

The useful part is taking responsibility where it belongs, learning what we can, and moving towards forgiveness of ourselves and of other people. Earth School should help us put something down. It should not hand us something else to carry.

We Can Still Find Meaning

Not knowing why something happened doesn’t mean nothing meaningful can come from it. Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, wrote about our capacity to find meaning even in suffering. There is an important difference between finding meaning in something that happened and believing it happened in order to give us meaning.

Someone may come through a terrible experience with greater compassion, a different sense of what matters, or a completely changed direction in life. They took something they would never have chosen and, in time, made something meaningful from it. The meaning is theirs because they made it.

There is one thing to be careful of. Meaning must not become another route back to self-blame. If what we arrive at is “I deserved this”, “I caused this”, or “I should have known better”, we have not found meaning at all. We have found the guilt again and given it a more respectable name.

What Is Available to Me Now?

There is a better question than “why did this happen?”, and it is this: “what is available to me now?”

Sometimes the answer is significant. There is something to change, somebody to forgive, a decision to make, or a pattern we are finally ready to put down. Sometimes it is much smaller. Eat something. Tell somebody we are struggling. Go for a walk. Get through today.

The size of the step does not matter. The question brings us out of trying to change what has already happened, and back into the part of our lives where we still have a say.

Earth School is about what we choose to do with our experiences, not about deciding why they happened.

Earth School is about what we choose to do with our experiences, not about deciding why they happened

Earth School is not about judging our past selves with what we know today, but about learning from our experiences and choosing differently when we understand more. In the next article, we will explore the two thought systems that shape how we see those experiences and how we can begin to recognise which one we are using.

Articles in The Earth School

Earth School: Why Life Is Your Greatest Teacher

What Is Life Trying to Tell Me?
Not Everything Happens for a Reason

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