Not Everything Happens for a Reason

Disappointment really doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling of having the package you have been eagerly awaiting stolen from the foyer of your apartment building. And yes, while I am out $57 it actually isn’t the money which bothers me the most (though it does bother me…that’s a lot of money for me right now). I was excited to get my package, damn it! And now I’m not going to. :(

The worst part of this, however, isn’t the theft—it’s how I reacted to it. Namely, how I compulsively checked the mail box seven times that evening even though I knew that it wouldn’t be there and how I immediately blamed myself for the theft. As if there was anything I could do about it. Our apartment complex doesn’t offer a secure place for us to receive our packages and I can hardly afford a PO Box simply to receive stuff like this on the occasions that I order things through the mail. In my head I know that it is just a random crappy thing that happened to me…but...that doesn’t stop me from blaming myself.

My mind spun and I was a bit numb and shocked when I first realized what had happened, and then a small anxious part of me freaked out: clearly, the universe is trying to tell me that I’m making too many online purchases and this is to teach me a lesson about watching my finances and not ordering so many things through the mail. Yeah. That’s where my anxiety ridden brain immediately went. And that’s the bigger issue here.

I didn’t do anything to cause this. It just happened, and it sucked, but it didn’t have anything to do with my decisions or actions. It’s not some cosmic punishment for being an imperfect human being who occasionally spends too much dough on mail-order items. Just like my mother getting cancer: it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It isn't a divine judgement of me. It just happened. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Because not everything has to fit.

Because not everything has to be a direct consequence of things I have or haven’t done.

The world is not a 1:1 place; you don’t always get out what you put in. By the same token you sometimes get lucky and get a bonus. Not every bad thing is a failure just like not every good thing is a success. Just because there is a cultural predisposition in my community toward the old stand-by “everything happens for a reason”, doesn’t mean I have to buy into it. No, damn it—not everything has a reason.

That said, recognizing that I'm not culpable doesn’t mean I can’t still make something valuable out of the “random bad thing” that happened to me. I don’t have to go as far as to think that the package being stolen was somehow a direct result of my recently erratic spending habits, but the sudden anxiety I feel at the thought of losing such a large sum of money in one fell swoop does draw attention to just how shaky my finances are and how I continue to spend money despite not having any. That warrants paying some attention to the underlying reason for the freak out—there is something wrong here. There was a reason for my spending beyond “needing” the items, because I don’t need them but I still bought them and obviously I feel bad about it which means that on some level I’m already aware that it was a compulsive purchase and not a rational one and that concerns me on a level deeper than I am willing to acknowledge.

 But the fact that the package went missing isn’t a reflection on my worth as a person. If I choose to learn a lesson about my psyche from this, then that is my choice—but that doesn’t mean that the universe did this to me to teach me that lesson, it means I made meaning out of something which was otherwise inherently meaningless. Just like I found meaning in my mother’s illness.

Making meaning in the face of chaos and disorder is a triumph of human spirit, but we must not confuse it with a justification for those things happening in the first place.

…..and there’s a chance that the package just got delivered to the wrong box and that the other person will eventually notice the mistake and return it. Or that the delivery person accidentally marked it as delivered and didn’t actually take it off the truck. Or that it wasn’t delivered because a signature was required when I wasn’t expecting that and the delivery man either forgot to put a notification slip on my box or it blew away in the high winds we had. There have been other package thefts recently, but not all is lost just yet.

In case you're wondering, the package contained cards. No, not tarot cards, just regular (albeit collectible and therefore expensive) playing cards. But for reasons I will post about later, those cards are important to me for divinatory and other reasons.

 I sat before my Akhu shrine and offered a deal: intervene if you can to get the cards back for me, and you can have one of the decks dedicated solely to communicating with you--I'll even keep it in the Akhu shrine. So…we’ll see. I don’t know if there is anything they can do, but it is worth a shot.