I’m starting to believe that those cliché things we say too
much are some of the truest words around, even though we don’t usually treat
them like they are. The old, worn adage “everything happens for a reason” is
usually dragged out and passed to someone who’s hurting the way you’d dig out a
crumpled tissue from your purse: with good intention, sure, but what can a
single tissue do for that flood of stinging tears?
Of course, we use it for happy things, too: when you’re with
your girlfriends, talking about the guy so-and-so dated for a year back in college,
and how heartbroken she was and how angry you all were when he ended it. But
now she’s twisting a brand-new ring around her finger, smiling breathlessly,
shyly, as she recounts the way her fiancée proposed, and how she would have
never thought, back then, that her heart was broken so that it could grow to
understand this new, deeper love.
“Everything happens for a reason,” one of you says, and
everyone else nods sagely. There’s a moment of silence, maybe, and then someone
jumps ahead to wedding plans: what colors she’s thinking of or what style of
dress, and then the moment is passed, the weighty old words forgotten in the
lighter conversation.
These phrases, these words that’ve been strung together into
the same patterns, the same sentences, over and over and over again... why do
they carry so much weight? Why do we repeat them—fall back on them—only when we
have nothing else to say?
I think it’s because they’re true. The cheesiest clichés got
to be what they are because, again and again, they fit that exact moment in her
life, and that one in yours, and the one in his, too.
Everything happens for a reason.
Today I’m more convinced of that than ever, because today
was one of those mixed moments of sweetness and sadness that I’m learning can
be the teachers of some of the most profound lessons. Living in Schenectady has
brought this up over and over again, but it’s a concept I have to say I’m slow
to grasp.
Today, we sat outside on a patio at a restaurant and shared
dinner with some friends we probably won’t see again for a while. We don’t have
years and years of history together, but they’re some pretty cool people, we’ve
shared experiences and jokes and pieces of life with each other, and so hugging
goodbye on the street afterwards was harder than I expected it to be.
Tomorrow, our friends will pack up their little blue car and
drive south for 13 hours, and we’ll stay here, in our little patchwork
apartment, where we’ve already put down some roots and will continue to put
down some more. But as I drive home alone, sniffling, I’m thinking of how much
it’s going to hurt when someday, it’s us packing up the car and driving off
into the sunset, leaving behind this place and these people that we’ve come to
love so much.
But I’m also thinking of how incredibly, incredibly blessed
we’ve been, for three years in New York, yes, but also for these few months of
friendship in particular. For conversations over cannolis that turned strangers
into friends, and stories shared on brand-new summer nights that tasted like
spicy-sweet Moroccan food. For words that tumbled out as easy as laughter, and
for train rides and parades and sunny park benches.
This little friendship we grew in the span of a few
too-short months is like the past three years in Schenectady in miniature. A
lesson that yes, everything—the good and the bad—is designed by Someone who
knows much, much better what we need than we do ourselves. A lesson in reaching
out past our boundaries, investing in something else with a little piece of
ourselves, and discovering how that can be so happy and so sad and so beautiful, all
at the same time. And a lesson in how the things that stretch you like that, in
both directions, are the things that make you the most realized, alive version
of yourself… probably because you’ve been pulled outside of yourself, into
something more.
I’m convinced. This life is full of purpose.
