There’s no point asking why things happen to you. Truth is, there are no answers!
Early this morning, I was on the weekly Southern Spice radio show (on Radio Zindagi 1600 AM), that’s popular in the Tristate area on USA’s East Coast, with RJs Subha, Venky and Sridhar. I was talking about how it is possible to ‘Help Yourself To Happiness’ despite your circumstances. Subha wanted to know how we can try to reason why things happen to us.
I often get asked this question. I have asked myself this question too for a long, long time. The truth is, among all the questions that you ask in Life, ‘why’ and ‘why me’ are the most wasted, pointless questions. There are no reasons for why things happen to us. Life is just a series of events, happenings.
Ideally, we must not approach anything with logic in Life. I firmly believe that there’s no logic to Life – for you can’t ask questions of Life and expect to get answers! Yet, look around you, isn’t Life sheer magic? But because logic is so ingrained in us, as part of our educational conditioning and knowledge-fabric, we ask ‘why’, we ask ‘why me’, we want to know the cause and effect of everything and we reason with Life’s happenings by trying to connect the dots. Even if we can’t say for sure why something is happening to us, our human, logical, analytical, mind, goes back and tries to connect the dots backwards. And we gloat over and glorify the fact that we have found the reasons for why Life happened to us the way it did. But, if we pause to reflect, we will see how pointless such analysis is. Isn’t it enough you know you have a problem and have to deal with it? How can you solve any problem by asking ‘why’ and ‘why me’? Isn’t ‘How’ a better question to ask when you seek resolution to a problem?
What comes between you and your happiness is all this avoidable, wasteful analysis. There is no Life for each of us, at any time, before the present and beyond the present. Your Life is always happening in the now. Yet you allow your mind to drag you into the past and hold you hostage there or you allow yourself to be terrorized by worries of a future which is yet to be born. Interestingly, if you drop the ‘why’ and ‘why me’ questions, dealing with Life becomes instantaneously simpler. Because when you don’t question, when you don’t resist whatever’s happening, you can only engage with it. Engagement means being available to, being accepting of, just being with whatever is. When you just are, you may be shaken, but not stirred, you may be under pressure, but not beaten, and you can be happy no matter what is happening to you!