5 Reasons Why Everything Happens for a Reason in Life
Life is a learning process. How much easier life would be if we could go through puberty, education, first love, and all our jobs all over again with the wealth of knowledge available in middle or later years. We would probably be the kings of everyday life. Even if our parents have tried their best to give us plenty of tools and their own experience to take along, we have to walk this path ourselves.
It is also well known that well-intentioned advice never has the same learning effect as the school of hard knocks. We meet people who hurt and disappoint us, we strive for a good education and a satisfying job but end up empty-handed. We long for love and happiness, and it is precisely in this area that we often have to fight the hardest battles and suffer the greatest defeats.
But none of these things happen without a reason. There are at least 5 good reasons, which we will present to you in this article, why everything happens for a reason in life.
1. Every experience strengthens your empathy and sensitivity.
Be careful when choosing your friends and spheres of activity. Every experience we have to go through strengthens our antennae and our sensitivity towards others. The more people we meet, the easier it becomes over time to understand their motives and motivations. As we get older, we become better at interpreting certain signs and signals more quickly, but also develop more tolerance for others.
So each human interaction prepares us for the next. But it also strengthens us. Over time, we gain experience and learn how to more quickly figure out how to handle people and situations. There might have been an early time in the other person’s life when we might have been able to change him or her, but as a general rule, we cannot change people. We can change our expectations of them and how we deal with them.
2. The goal is progress, not perfection.
If we humans were perfect, we would be gods or other unearthly beings. So we're going to have to grapple with our imperfections and our mediocrity for the rest of our lives. However, this starting position enables us to grow and develop further. According to Albert Einstein, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome.
So we should never waste an opportunity to improve ourselves and climb a rung up the ladder of knowledge. Sometimes we need several attempts for this. Especially when it comes to relationships, we often simply do not want to admit that certain life models correspond to our wishes, but not to our inclinations.
In work and career, we prefer to follow an invisible agenda that someone at some point defined as success. This "one size fits all" thinking often torments us for years until we finally allow the light of knowledge to reach into our minds.
3. Every new insight helps you to clear up old mistaken opinions.
They are a gift from childhood and adolescence, but also from social media, which unfortunately can develop into a Trojan horse. Opinions are good and important, but ideally they are a product of our beliefs—as tested by experience and experiment. But that takes time. In our early 20s, we will still be born in the shadow of our upbringing and the good advice and quick fixes of our parents, grandparents, and others.
Then, over the years, we find that much of what is instilled in us as the only truth may be true for other people, but not for us. For example, if you grew up with the maxim "money spoils character," you would find it difficult for a while to be financially successful with a clear conscience. At some point, however, you will realize that your character has not deteriorated because you are earning and saving significant amounts of money.
The situation is similar with the family image of father, mother, child, or a relationship scheme that allows the distribution of roles to live on as it was 20, 30, 40 years ago.
4. Every event strengthens your resilience.
Or as our grandparents used to say, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This old saying is extremely harsh, but true. Resilience has been on everyone's lips for a number of years, but it means nothing more than our mental and emotional resilience. In the same way that successfully surviving a disease can strengthen your immune system, a similar relationship exists between living life and developing resilience.
Anyone who has to start over and over again will emerge stronger as long as he doesn’t give up. In the meantime, there are also numerous self-help groups, seminars, and coaches who can help you to strengthen your resilience. Don’t wait for life to test you, steadily work on building up your own resilience and make provision for bad times. Resilience is the strongest weapon we can muster when fate comes up with a declaration of war.
5. Past troubles prepare you for your future.
In addition to mental and emotional resilience, our minds also appreciate a little support. The mind feeds on information and impressions that it reliably stores—to be called up at any time when needed. Such facts and experiences are always extremely useful when life demands rational decisions from us. When we know that option A hasn't worked for us before, our reason will do its best to save us from making the same mistake again.
It’s important to note that bad experiences tend stick in our memories better than good ones. We owe this survival mechanism to Mother Nature and her clever design, our evolutionary biological development history. To put it very simply, if we’ve successfully faced disaster before, we will be better prepared to handle potential future disasters. In the twenty-first century, such déjà vu experiences may no longer be life-threatening.
But perhaps you felt the touch of death while ice climbing at the North Pole, or a 40-hour week in an office with artificial lighting catapulted you into a straight jacket. Such are valuable experiences that life reveals to us in its generosity. Unfortunately, the principle "The harder the lesson, the better and more lasting the learning effect from it," also applies here.
Today’s Conclusion
Good and bad situations arise for good reasons. As long as the dramas and failures remain manageable, it is easy for us to suspect a higher plan in events. However, when tragic strokes of fate befall us and you have to let loved ones go before their time, it is difficult for us to believe in any meaning behind it.
Those who trust in a God, who can muster the universe or other higher powers, will certainly handle such troughs better than people who are devoid of any spiritual inclination. Those who aimlessly wander through life day by day, as if on a scavenger hunt, without thought about eternity, will only grow weaker and more unhappy with each crisis.
Anyone who somehow manages not to completely evade the idea that everything in our life has a purpose, a purpose and, above all, a meaning, will emerge from crises strengthened and well-armed for the future. Unfortunately, there is no guide on how to learn to trust in a higher power. Faith begins exactly where our knowledge ends. That's it for today.