Things Happen for a Reason?

Recently, a Facebook Friend wrote “Things happen for a reason.”

 After some superficial reflection, and taking into account that things weren’t defined, happen wasn’t specified and reason wasn’t made clear, I decided Things Happen for a Reason (with appropriate capitalization) is a pretty good everyday mantra. Many situations we face don’t need clarification, specification or clarity.  The job doesn’t materialize, the significant other is grouchy or the favored candidate loses the election.  Although there may be reasons, who cares?

Then I started to think harder and the mantra fell apart.  It’s true—at least according to basic Buddhism as I understand it—that karma is action (reason) and its consequence (things),and this process can span lifetimes and affect many other lives.  In that sense, the thought holds.

  But Buddha probably never met Everlee Shepherd Hambright.  Everlee, my husband’s late grandmother, was born in 1899 in Grover, NC.  She spent most of her life in a small house on the side of King’s Mountain, NC.  As she approached middle age which can be a particularly unreasonable time of life, she inexplicably dropped the r in Everlee and added an i and became Evielee (Ev-ee-lee) Hambright for the rest of her life. Around the same time, she constructed a wall of 1950’s era family photos. At the top of the pyramid, was a picture of young Elvis.  In the late 1970s, the empty lot next door which had always afforded her and her husband, George, a beautiful forest view was sold and a ball bearing plant was built blocking the pastoral beauty.  Evielee’s dilemma in my opinion was not to adjust to changing times, but how to find out about her new neighbor.  She finally decided to bake a pound cake and deliver to the plant.

We will never know the reasons for the dropped r, the fact that Elvis was King of the Family or how a pound cake was supposed to give her the opportunity to shed light on the mystery of a factory instead of a person as a neighbor.    We do know that Evielee coped with a changing world without moving from her home, her religion or herself.  How she accomplished these feats—the reasons behind each of the above actions—we can’t know and even Evielee may have been a bit mystified at her own actions.

After using Evielee to point out that middle-aged Things don’t always Happen for Reasons, I decided to not delve any further into mantras or mysteries.  After all, I live near Miami where odd and horrific crimes happen regularly without any special discernible causes.

  Although I passed eighth-grade science and can discuss shifting tectonic plates and earthquakes on a par with most seventh-grade science fair contestants, the loss of life and livelihood that accompany natural disasters still seem without reason to me.

So it is back to Facebook to discover the sayings, reasons and daily mantras that will point the way to my next  reason to write a small story.