When something bad happens, what is easier?
To blame God or yourself for your misfortune or to accept that bad things just happen to people sometimes?
My dad died of a very long, drawn out illness. It took him ten years to die. It was a pretty miserable death too. Every vestige of his being was slowly and steadily erased until he passed away in 2005, twenty years before his time. During that time I don’t remember ever thinking that God (or bob forbid, he) was to blame for what happened to him. You see, he lived a good life. I still think of him as one of the most caring, gentle, kind, friendly and unjudgemental people I have ever met. If he were alive and well today we would be the best of friends, as we were when I was growing up. He never “deserved” what happened to him in later life, as if “deserving” meant anything in this context.
How people die has rarely anything to do with how they live. And bad things often happen to individuals for no reason that can be attributed back to them. Once that is accepted, we can get on with our lives without any unfounded expectations on us regarding some sort of cosmic justice-giver.
Realising this has helped me to get on with life. It helped me to get over my father’s death, and the other things that have been thrown in my way since then. Why? Because I could deal with my feelings, emotions and relationship in the present without having to dwell on non-sequiturs from the past.
An alternative is to look at bad things in the light of a supreme being, who is either trying to punish you or test you. Trying to posit a reason or blame for these things is both an exercise in futility, as well as the cause of significant mental anguish. Imagine working through your past to discover a “reason” for getting cancer, or losing a loved one, or being attacked by someone you didn’t know. The outcome of this mental exercise is going to be painful, no matter how it ends up. Any “reason” you find will most likely be wrong, or you won’t find a good reason, and you will continue to hurt yourself until the grief and despair eventually subsides. The reality is bad enough already without having to invent further sources of guilt and trauma.
Of course, sometimes bad things happen to people that were caused by them in the first place, but usually in those situations the reasons are easy to uncover. It’s important to realise though that not everything bad happens as a result of personal fault. In the many situations where you are left asking “what did I do?”, the answer is almost always “nothing at all”.
I find Sod’s Law, therefore, to be both reasonable and uplifting. And I’m also happy to accept that it has a very important corollary: Good Things Happen too.
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