Cliché

Clichés, as a rule, bother me. This has to do with my innate dislike for anything that must “be accepted”. The absolute BEST way to get me to not read a book, not see a movie, not do something, is to tell me I MUST read XYZ book, I MUST see XYZ movie, I MUST do whatever. It just won’t happen. If I’m in “polite” mode I will dither, if you are family I *may* humor you, but otherwise it’s just not going to happen. This explains why I still haven’t seen the “Breakfast Club”, why it took some serious cajoling to read Lean In (yes, yes, blog post coming about it eventually), and why, at 40, I don’t know if I own a hairdryer because I simply refuse to use one.

Clichés are the verbal “you must”. It suggests that there is something out there you must do, or must allow, because it just *is*. The absolute worst one, in my opinion, is “Everything Happens For A Reason”.

Please. Just… don’t.

Things happen because they happen. There is little reason in someone going in to a school and shooting children, there is little reason in the antics of Congress (these days), there is little reason in Wall Street (as evidenced by a DOW nearing 16k whilst we have the hurdles we have. There need not be, and frequently there is not, a reason.

Saying “Everything happens for a reason” is a way of accepting a lack of control; it means “I can’t see a good reason for this to happen in a logical world so I will abuse this platitude and hope this changes the subject and/or gets the person who is trembling with doubt, pain, or hurt to stop it long enough for me to be comfortable”. Looking for “reason” where no good one is, is insanity. Or optimism.

I’m more of a fan of “It is what it is.” “Que sera, sera”, however sung by Doris Day, is accurate. Things happen: this much is true. Entropy increases. Time marches. But the notion that there is some underlying reason causing a typhoon to kill off five thousand people, or a tsunami and earthquake to hit the site of a nuclear reactor, is asinine.

OK: Point and counterpoint. Correlation and causality. That is to say, YES, ultimately there is a cause to every effect.  A ginormous typhoon hit the Philippines because global warming has warmed the atmosphere and waterways in that area to a devastating effect and the bomb that would go off there went off with a bigger bang; people tend to build nuclear reactors near waterways in order to easily flood the site to cool it down. But when people say “Things happen for a reason” they do NOT mean, “things happen because a series of events led to them”, they mean, “there is some good reason for this to have happened” and “good reason” usually infers somehow, somewhere, there is benefit.

You will notice that very rarely does anyone say “Things happen for a reason” where something happens that is obviously beneficial. “Things happen for a reason” is not applied to the lottery win, or the quick reflexes that get you OUT of a car accident, or the “A” you got on your Chemistry final. No, then you take the credit: you studied, you had quick reflexes, YOU picked the lucky number. So if it’s good, you controlled it with your abilities and your skills; if it’s bad there must be some better reason for you to have fallen on misfortune.

I have been in plenty of good circumstance that was of my own doing, and nearly as much malfeasance that was as well. I do not attribute this to “fortune”, I attribute this to the way things are. It is what it is.

But it may not have happened for a “reason”.