Meant To Be
March 27th, 2009
“Everything happens for a reason.”
I hear this statement everywhere these days, especially in the form of “this was meant to be.” As a consistent agnostic, leaning toward atheist individual… I disagree. Admitting that an outside force is out there controlling what happens to us to any extent is the same as confirming the existence of a higher power, unless you like to make the joke that everything happens for a reason even if it’s “just because.”
A lot of things do happen for a reason. Girls get pregnant because they’ve been inseminated, people decide to go to college because they think it’s a good investment - hell, I ate Cinnamon Toast Crunch this morning because I felt like it. But these are things that happened based on conscious decision. For whatever reason, they were made to happen because someone wanted them to. But it wasn’t God, and it wasn’t an outside force either, not unless peer pressure was involved. I am of the opinion that if God exists, he/she/it is way too busy doing Godly stuff to watch every human being simultaneously, but I’ll get into that rant at another time.
The problem I have with someone declaring that an event was meant to happen is that it is essentially a romanticized view of the world based on ideals rather than realism. So you meet someone that you really hit it off with at the same place at the same time; there is another word for this, and it is called coincidence (unless of course you or that person purposely set things up so you could meet). And while I agree that a string of coincidences seems highly unlikely, well… what percent of the world believes in Darwin’s evolution theory again? Adaption itself is not a coincidence in theory, but what I am pointing at here in particular is the evolution of life itself. Life started with bacteria and tiny molecules, right? (That’s the theory I’m sticking with, anyway.) Now, how long do you think it took its development to actually take place, and while we’re on that train of thought, how many times do you think it failed before things worked together sufficiently? The amount of times it took is coincidence, as is the success of the adaption in question. Trial and error.
I mean, let’s say I’m walking and I trip and fall, causing me to earn yet another scar for my leg. Was that meant to be? No, that was me being very clumsy and not watching what I was doing carefully enough. Let’s adjust it. Let’s say I’m walking behind someone, trip, fall, and land on them. We then introduce ourselves, get talking, become friends, get married, have children and are eventually buried next to each other. Was that meant to be? In a way, yes, it was. Meeting them was a complete accident, but the communication afterward opened more doors to possible futures.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Your life is what you do with it, your relationships are built upon the actions between you and the other person, your talents are yours and formed by the amount of practice you have at them, and ultimately, your future is only created based on what you have or have not done to achieve it. It is a disservice to the amount of effort you deposit into your life to lay it all down on God’s table. Stand up and take a bow; this success is yours, with maybe a bit of blame on luck. 
P.S. I know this isn’t the best blog post I’ve ever written, but I knew that if I didn’t publish it today it would never get done. I’ll revisit it later with a hopefully more tied in approach to (my) life with less vague examples, I just needed to get this out there.
