Two days ago my daughter put on one hell of a performance. She marched out of her room and screamed at me in a way that she hasn’t done before. There was lightning flashing in her eyes and fire coming from her nose and not much that I could do about it. She screamed, “I hate you” and then jumped on my lap and burst into tears.
She doesn’t want to move. Ask her and she’ll tell you that the house is perfect and that I am capable of fixing anything that is broken. In her eyes I am superman and capable of doing anything I want. I appreciate it and want so very badly to live up to her expectations but there are some things that I can’t do. I can’t fly. I can’t lift the car with one hand and I can’t see the future.
All I can do is try and make good choices based upon the things I know and what I can guess will happen. All I can do is my best to make good decisions for my children. So that means that sometimes hard and very painful decisions must be made with the hope that things will work out.
These kids of mine don’t need all of the details or reasons why things are as they are. I could tell them that there are criminals in the banking system whose greed is causing untold damage throughout the country. But then I would want to have a bigger discussion about capitalism and business. I’d want to launch into a longer talk about what is right and what is fair and how there are significant distinctions. I’d want to say that sometimes you don’t do something just because you can, but she is 7 and these aren’t discussions that she needs to have now.
I don’t walk around railing about how I have been unfairly victimized and mistreated. But sometimes in the dead of the night in between the cracks and creaks of the house I wonder if things happen for a reason. I wander outside and sit under a moonlit sky and let my thoughts run where they may and I listen.
And sometimes I find myself feeling like maybe there is something more speaking to me. It is a soft whisper that I can barely make out that suggests that maybe I pay more attention to this or that. The problem is that trying to focus upon is a little bit like squeezing water in the palm of your hand. Squeeze too tightly and it slips out between your fingers leaving you with a damp trail that provides faint evidence that it was ever there. So I shrug my shoulders and try to apply logic to what I feel.
On the whiteboard that lives inside my head I prepare a list of things and ask if they could have come from coincidence or something more. Sometimes the answer is clearly yes and I think that nothing amazing or unusual has happened because XYZ could happen to anyone at any time.
Yet, every now and then I find that I am unable to just blow things off and I scratch my head because there aren’t explanations for what I experienced. So I have to ask if my mind sees what I want it to see or if maybe there is something more.
It is your turn now. Do you think that things happen for a reason or is life a series of coincidences that look like they could be something more?
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