Why Did This Happen?

Everyone likes to know of causes and their effects.  For most people, we look at situations to see what we may have control over and what we cannot control. 

During our lives we learn that we can have our way or not about this and that.  We can cause this or change that, or are not able to do anything about some aspects of our daily lives.  We learn about how to do this in so many ways – everything from education to our work places and families.  We often surround ourselves with people who help to be able to get things done – to reach our goals in life.  Now and then, we run into trouble because we meet people who affect our lives but not in particularly helpful ways. 

Sometimes there are people in our lives we feel confused about.  Perhaps because we made friends with them when we were not being ‘purpose oriented’ beyond that and then later we find them to sometimes benefit our lives but also feel tripped up from time to time – if not by them, then by our relationship with them.  Women have suffered from this type of difficulty even with spouses and their own children where they chose to include these people and the relationships are very rewarding but sometimes there is some kind of obstacle created by the dynamics involved. 

Whenever we learn a new skill in life, part of what we are learning is why some event occurred.  Often we find we had some relevance in the sequence of events and other times we discover ‘it was not about ourselves at all, but had to do with circumstances or events that we did not have the causal power to effect.’  When we have blamed others for our problems only to learn that we ourselves are the main source of the difficulty it can be difficult to adjust to accepting the greater responsibility for our own actions.  There are also times when we have to relinquish our sense of control – which we may have maintained with great pride, and realize that some chain of cause and effect is not ‘within our own reach’ so to speak. 

Learning cause and effect can be fun.  It can be deeply personal or not.  Knowing why something happened seems helpful when we view it as having caused happiness but when an event was not good then knowing the causes seems to serve just one purpose: prevention in the event of future circumstances that may resemble previous ones.