When something terrible happens, we naturally want to know why. We can blame ourselves, somebody else, God, fate or life itself, because an explanation can feel easier to live with than having none at all. But sometimes the most truthful answer is simply 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 life’s disappointments or unexpected turns. The job we didn’t get leads somewhere else. A plan falls through, and another possibility opens up. Looking back, we sometimes discover that what felt like 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 the events that change somebody’s life in ways they would never have chosen. The death of a child is not a lesson. We simply cannot know why those things happen.
I am not writing this from the outside. I have lost people I loved, some when it was expected and some with no warning at all, and I have never found a reason for any of it. The grief was hard, and some of it always will be. What I did eventually stop doing was looking for the explanation, and this article is about what became possible after that.
If you are reading this because something has happened that nobody has been able to explain to you, I am not going to try either. What I can offer is what I have found useful when the explanation never came.
This is where the idea of Earth School needs some care. Not everything that happens can be explained as a lesson, and believing it can may leave us searching for something we did wrong, something we failed to notice or something we were apparently supposed to learn.
There is a much bigger picture of which we see only a tiny part. Some things happen that we cannot control and cannot explain. We don’t have to blame ourselves, somebody else or anything beyond us to make sense of them.
Sometimes I don’t know why this happened is not an inadequate answer. It is the most honest one.
The Trap of Taking Responsibility
Seeing life as a school does not mean taking responsibility for everything that happens. The real question is knowing what is ours to change and what is ours to accept. We can pay attention, make the best choice available to us and still get an outcome we would never have chosen. Listening well doesn’t give us control over everything that happens next.
Sometimes life is showing us a belief, pattern or choice we need to change. At other times, we have done what we can, and the task is to accept what we cannot control, hand it over to our Higher Self and move forward. 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, though, that same instinct produces a guilt which is remarkably hard to shift, and it is one of the more reliable routes into depression.
There is no universal answer. We each have different patterns, experiences and, if we think of life as a school, a different curriculum. We won’t always judge it correctly. But we can keep asking: is there something here for me to change, or is this something I need to accept? And sometimes, we simply won’t know yet.
Sometimes The Lesson Is Acceptance
Sometimes there is nothing left for us to understand or change. The learning is in accepting that we may never know why something happened.
That can be surprisingly difficult. We can spend years asking why this happened to me, going back over the same ground in the hope that eventually we will find the answer that makes everything fall into place.
Sometimes that reflection is useful. But there comes a point when we are no longer discovering anything new. We are simply returning to the pain and asking it to give us an answer it may not have.
Acceptance doesn’t mean saying what happened was right, fair or somehow meant to be. It means recognising that we may never understand the bigger picture, and deciding we don’t need to understand it in order to move forward. Sometimes we won’t know whether something is asking us to act or accept. We don’t always have to decide straight away; sometimes we can simply wait and listen.
Acceptance may itself be too much to ask, particularly when something painful is still raw. This is where willingness can be enough, and willingness has always been the only thing any of this actually asks of us. We don’t have to make peace with what happened or even be ready to move forward. We can simply be willing to believe that, at some point, there may be something beyond where we are now.
What Becomes Possible from Here?
Once we stop needing an explanation, a different question becomes available: what is available to me now? This isn’t about looking on the bright side or finding something good in what happened. Some experiences don’t have a bright side, and we don’t need to invent one. It is about accepting where we are and asking what is possible from here.
Sometimes the answer will be something significant. Sometimes it will be very small: eat something, tell someone we are struggling, make one decision, or simply get through the day. The size of the step doesn’t really matter. What matters is that instead of taking us back into what has already happened, it brings us into the part we still have some say over.
We Can Still Find Meaning
Not knowing why something happened doesn’t mean nothing meaningful can come from it. Viktor Frankl had more reason than most to think about this. Having survived the concentration camps, he wrote about our capacity to find meaning even in suffering. That is very different from saying the suffering happened in order to teach us something, and I think that distinction matters.
Someone may come through a terrible experience with greater compassion, a different sense of what matters or a completely changed direction in life. None of that proves the experience was sent to produce those changes. It means they made something meaningful out of something they would never have chosen, and the meaning is theirs because they made it.
There is one thing I would be careful of. Meaning should not become another route back to self-blame. If the conclusion we reach is I deserved this, I caused this, or I should have known better, we may not have found meaning at all. We may simply have found the guilt again.
Guilt And Forgiveness
Finding meaning doesn’t mean being grateful for what happened or pretending we have no regrets. Sometimes we recognise that we got something wrong and would choose differently now. Remorse is a natural part of that.
Guilt is different when it becomes a way of repeatedly punishing ourselves for something we can no longer change. The useful part is taking responsibility where it is appropriate, learning what we can and, eventually, moving towards forgiveness of ourselves and others. Earth School should help us put something down, not give us something else to carry.
Try This: Only When There Is Room
If something is still raw, leave this for now. There is no timetable for understanding it, accepting it or finding meaning in it.
When there is a little more room, take one difficulty you have been asking why about and ask something different. What part of this is mine, and what isn’t?
Then ask: what is available to me now?
Don’t force an answer or look for a lesson. Write down whatever comes, even if it is very small. Perhaps there is something to change, something to accept, or simply something you are willing to see differently.
And if the answer today is I don’t know, let that be enough too.
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