“Everything happens for a reason”
Well, that’s a lovely thought and I know it has really helped people through horrific times. Unfortunately I find, over and over again, that it isn’t the truth. I look in people’s soul books seeking an answer for why this or that happened, what the person is meant to learn from it, and why on Earth they would agree to such a thing. And 50% of the time they didn’t, there isn’t, and the reason is the unforseen consequence of their or someone else’s free will.
Personally I find that comforting. If everything happened for a reason there are a number of things that have occurred in my life that I would need to have explained and I would be very angry at the power’s that be for their unnecessary cruelty and perversity. I don’t like thinking that my life is that of a robot following someone else’s programming nor do I like to try and twist my mind around the fact that this would mean genocides such as those perpetrated upon the Rwandans, the Native Americans, Armenians, Assyrians, Dersum Kurds and the populations of Darfur had spiritual purpose.
Instead, what I find in soul books is that we make plans, we set things in motion, we contract with others to provide what they and we need, all the while knowing that with free will these things might not come to pass. Life is not scripted, it is improv with a theme. We head in a direction knowing where it is we want to go and how, in general, we want to get there, and then we dive in. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we don’t meet our goals, sometimes we exceed them and sometimes we decide on different ones midstream. As it’s never too late, no opportunity is every truly lost, and no magic is ever found in the safe and the known, life is full of profound interconnectedness between beings. Sometimes those interconnections cause damage, we get broken, we are altered from who we have been.
That’s what I love so much about Kintsukuroi. It is the art that, to me, best reflects human life as I experience it and as I read it in each soul book I encounter. It is the beauty of an item which has been broken. It is made more beautiful by repairing its brokenness. It is not the same, it is more and in the process it has become a work of art.
