Have & Have Not

Every event has a purpose and every setback its lesson. I have realized that failure, whether of personal, professional or even spiritual kind, is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather, embrace it as the teacher that it is.

Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle. We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us. But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other and are invigorated by the stretching. The difficulty with big city environment is that if we select—and we must in order to live and breathe and work in such crowded conditions—we tend to select people like ourselves, a very monotonous diet. All hors d’oeuvres and no meat; or all sweets and no vegetables, depending on the kind of people we are. But however much the diet may differ between us, one thing is fairly certain: we usually select the known, seldom the strange. We tend not to choose the unknown which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.

I knew everything happened for a reason. I just wished the reason would hurry up and make itself known.

With everything there is what to do.

Francesca was a strong believer in fate. She assumed he picked up the habit from her therapist who was constantly preaching that “everything happened for a reason”, but regardless she now spouted out that philosophy like she was paid to. Everything big in her life, she believed it was all a part of God’s plan – it was all fate. So the way she saw it, it had to be fate that Paul came into her life like this.