Recovery

We live in a world where, sometimes, bad things happen. Whether they happen to us or happen to someone we know or happen to someone we don’t know, you can follow the chain (like a deranged version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon) person to person until you find someone to whom something bad has happened. Sometimes, actually let’s say most of the time, bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them. Because, really, who can say who does deserve pain and misery and fear?

So, when you see these bad things happen or these bad things are happening what do you do next? How do you move from the moment in which these things happened to the moment when you recover from these things? Is it ever, in the name of recovery, acceptable to promise things you know that you, in your capacity as a human being, are incapable of insuring?

Can you say this will never happen again?

This, I believe, is where many people turn to religion. Here, in an idea from Robert Krulwich, is where, above all else, you recover by finding hope.

This hope that there is some reason beyond our ability to understand that these things had to happen. Here, you have to hope that this God (or whatever you believe) has a plan or a future or a really, really good reason why.

Because, if not, all those bad things would just happen for the sake of happening. All the suffering and pain and fear would just be in this world for the sake of being in this world. Waiting to attack anyone.

How do you find the reason in the unreasonable?

According to Krulwich it is this belief that we must find in the recovery. In hope, we find reason in the unreasonable.