"A Reason for Everything"

A friend of mine hates that expression.  She thinks it's one of those panaceatic expressions that people  use when they want to be sympathetic, but don't know what else to say -- a meaningless, throwaway expression that gets them off the hook and on with their own safe, normal lives.  It makes her angrier than it should, which makes me think it hits a little too close to the heart of her spiritual confusion.  She suffered breast cancer; her mother died of Alzheimer's, and she can't see the reason for either.

I understand why she's angry.  Why do little children have cancer?  Why are dogs left tied up in the heat to die?  Why does a draft horse wander out of the fog onto the interstate, causing a crash that kills an entire family?  None of that makes sense.

The truth is -- shit happens, striking with a cliched vengeance -- out of the blue, from out of nowhere, like a ton of bricks.  And when it happens, you're left stumbling around in a different kind of fog, looking for any semblance of your old life to cling to, and sometimes all you can find is "There's a reason for everything" because if that's true then maybe there's a way through the miasma back to normal, back to a place where your brain stops pounding through your temples, and you believe you might actually want to live again.


William Carlos Williams wrote one of my favorite poems, "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens. 

It's about finding order in the chaos -- isolating details that ground you in a moment, just that one moment perhaps to catch your breath and find the courage to carry on.

If the way a person creates order is to find a reason amidst the madness, then "There's a reason for everything" isn't meaningless; it's a life preserver -- a red wheelbarrow, a white chicken.

A reason.