Everything Happens for a Reason, but Not for the Reason You Might Think by Kaitlin

Everything Happens for a Reason, but Not for the Reason You Might Think by Kaitlin - February 2014 Scholarship Essay

“Clouds coming floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

So declared Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali man known for being the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, who lived from the first half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth.

I have pretty much lived by this quote for my entire life, or at least for as long as I can remember. I saw it scrawled on an art wall in a little ice cream parlor down the street from my elementary school, one day when my father took me there after the final bell rang and released all of the students for the day. It stuck out because of the color of the paint in which it was written—a bright, bright blue amongst faded reds and purples and the brick of the wall itself—and, being seven years old and unable to read many of the words on my own, I asked my dad to read it to me. I didn't even fully understand it at the time (big words plus first grader equals right over my head), but I thought the words were pretty and so it stuck in my mind. Later, when I was older and more able to wrap my head around the meaning behind the words, I found myself repeating it in my head all the time, telling myself that the clouds floating in and out of my own life, from whatever troubles they might stem, were not going to ruin it if I didn't let them.

Remembering these words, spoken by a man who died half a century before I was born, saw me through all the typical middle and high school problems, as well as a few not-so-typical ones. I see them as my own version of the somewhat cliche mantra of “everything happens for a reason.” Well, not my own version, per se, but the one I choose to repeat to myself. That quote implies that problems fall upon us in order to make us stronger; Tagore’s words imply that problems fall upon us to add a certain kind of beauty to our lives, one that shows us how to appreciate the good as well as the bad and to give us something other than light to look at as we near the end. Tagore’s clouds add color to his sunset, and so do mine.

With that always in my mind, I have strove to see the potential for magnificence in anything that happens to me—to find the silver lining in the clouds, if you will. To me, a problem is not an obstacle or something to be conquered and overcome and then forgotten; it is something to accept, to take in stride, and yes, to fix. But even after I've fixed it, after it isn't a problem anymore, I will not forget it. I won’t block it from my memory or see it as a dark spot in my life. I lost my best friend in middle school due to a chasm of differences that became too great to cross, but the time between then and when I met the girl who has become my best friend now…as dark as it was at the time, now I see it as something that adds variation to my sky.

The sun’s rays are nothing but light without the water droplets in the clouds off which to reflect. It is the water that gives a sunset sky its color. If I see my troubles as nothing more than something to defeat and forget…well, my sky might still be pretty, but it will just be pretty. I don’t want that, and so I don’t go through my life worrying only about taking my problems head on and beating them into submission. I go through my life with my arms open, accepting the problems as they come, overcoming them as I must to continue on, and remembering where I've come from and what I've done as best as I can when I've won.