I've been thinking lately that everything happens for a reason. I don’t mean fate, or destiny, I just mean that everything has a reason, or, you could even say that nothing happens in isolation. Nothing in the universe is independent of everything else, everything has consequences, and everything has causes.

This means that, at all times, everything acts exactly as it should, if you take ‘should’ to mean, in response to a particular set of causes, as opposed to ‘as per our expectations’. For example, a wire on the television goes and we can no longer watch anything, all we get is that funny grey fuzz, whatever that is. Our first reaction in this situation is that the television is broken, but by broken what we mean is, it’s not doing what we want it to do, but as it is in the moment, it is doing exactly what it should be doing. I.e. broadcasting grey fuzz, because that is exactly what that layout of wires determines that it can do. What it was doing, and what it might do again are irrelevant, in the moment it is doing all it can.

Think back to a perceived mistake that you made, something that made you wish you’d acted differently. Now realise that there was no way you could have acted differently, nothing happens in isolation, and our actions are determined by millions of influences on us, just one of those things being different could have made that moment different, but it wasn’t. It was as it was, and now that it has happened it could not have happened any differently. Our perceptions make those moments wrong or right, but if we remove those perceptions then they’re just moments that were played out as circumstance dictated.

Does this mean that we should stop taking responsibility for our actions? No, it just means we should just stop fretting about the past. We can’t change the past, nor can we change the future. We can only change ourselves, in the now. Once we start to do this we change the circumstances we find ourselves in, because we are better people than we were, and we’ve started to make the now a better place to be in.