Not My Best Work

I just haven’t had much to say of late. Nothing has really happened that I felt like commenting on. I had no opinions on any news stories, I haven’t seen any movies and there are new poker stories worth telling. Okay, well I did play at Argosy for three hours the other night. And I was a winner. How much you ask? One dollar, that’s right. Exciting it isn’t but, anytime you leave the casino with as much money as you brought in you should be happy.

But last night I had a conversation with a friend, a conversation we’ve had a few thousand times in the past 10 years. And something I think I’ve mentioned here before. So forgive me if this is a case of de ja vu but, I don’t feel like going back and rereading the previous 180 posts right now.

The debate was on whether or not there was such thing as signs. See, she believes everyone’s in our lives for a reason. That everything happens for a greater reason. And I agree to a point. Everything, of course, has a reason. There’s a cause an effect around every aspect of life. I think the disagreement begins with what we’re calling “reason.” If I pick up some dice and throw them, and it comes up snake eyes, there’s a reason that happened. It has more to do with how I held them, how hard I threw them and what they may have bounced off of. But there is no great lesson or sign from the cosmos. It is completely random. She would try to tell me there’s a greater reason that I may not understand yet.

That’s just a bit silly. I can take whatever lesson I want from any situation, that doesn’t necessarily mean it happened to teach me what I took from it. That’s the choice I make. And that’s why everything in the world happens, choices. Sometimes its our own, sometimes things happen to us as a result of someone else’s choices. We can always learn something from any random situation. What we learn can and hopefully will impact our later choices. So, you can say that’s the “reason” things happen. I don’t believe that it’s part of some master plan, that every event in our lives was destined to happen.

If things like 9/11, Katrina, the Tsunami or American Idol happened for some greater reason then we should all be pretty pissed. But I guess it is 50/50 right?