Reply #12: Interesting you should ask ...

[RoyGBiv]

I'll try not to make this too long ...

This touches or can touch on questions of spirituality, so I view it in that context, largely because of discussions I have with a close friend who is a hardened atheist. I myself don't prescribe to religious dogma of any variety and don't view a anthropomorphic godlike presence in the universe as something real, but, simply based on my own experiences with life, have come around to understanding that science, while potentially capable of explaining everything, simply doesn't at the moment. That's not to say it won't, just that it doesn't right now, which can leave a person thinking of things in semi-spiritual ways.

That said ...

My friend and I got into an argument about something I said recently very much like this, i.e. all this happened for a reason. (That's the part that could be long that I'll avoid for the moment. A lot of things have happened in my life the last couple of years that make even the most skeptical people I know at least say, "Well, that's weird...." He asked if I'd become a predestination-ist now, to which I replied that I haven't. Then, I explained, as simply as I could and in terms I thought he could both understand and at least partly accept, what I mean by that.

If we take the step of believing in an objective reality, then all the events that took place in our lives up to this moment had to take place precisely as they did for this reality to exist. Change even one event in the past, and the current reality does not exist, ergo, things "had to happen" for the "reason" of creating this reality. Now, that may seem like a cop-out, and it's certainly not an original idea, but it gets to the heart of things I think.

I don't believe some human-like god moved me to Houston last year, but I also know that had any one of literally hundreds of different things not occurred precisely as they did, within very narrow parameters, I wouldn't be here. Am I supposed to be here? That would depend on who you ask, but getting here, why I got here, and all that goes with it, is one of those things that random chance doesn't describe completely.

I'll offer one example. A little over a year ago, I was sitting at work watching two of my co-workers play with their MySpace accounts during a break. I'd avoided social networking sites for various reasons, not the least of which was that my having moved to where I was then seven years before had partly been an exercise in "disappearing" from my former life. I didn't want people to find me. But, seven years had gone by, and I'd forgotten about most of that, so, while bored on my own break, I set up a MySpace account. I did nothing to it but fill out the basic profile and upload a picture.

That evening, while engaging in my ritual of standing out by my car and talking with one of my co-workers, we started talking about jazz and blues. He's a musician on the side and was wanting my help in setting up his computer for audio engineering. That discussion eventually turned to a guy I once knew who heads a blues band and then to his girlfriend, a friend of mine I'd known since we were teenagers and who I hadn't even heard from or talked about since 2001. Not even sure why they were in my head as I'd talked about blues with my co-worker before without mentioning them.

I got home that night and, within an hour, checked my e-mail and had a note telling me someone had sent me a message on MySpace. I looked at it, almost deleted it because I thought it was SPAM, then realized it wasn't.

It was that long-lost friend, who lives in Houston, and now here I am.

OnEdit: Let me add that I'm not applying a positive/negative matrix to this. I don't know that it is a "good" thing I am here nor a "bad" thing. But, I know I wouldn't be here if not for a specific series of events.