No, and I find that strangely comforting. If everything happened for a reason, the universe would owe me an explanation for a lot of things, starting with the time my flight got cancelled and I spent nine hours in an airport eating a fourteen dollar sandwich. What was the lesson there? Patience? I already had patience. Now I have patience and heartburn.

Here’s what I think actually happens: stuff occurs, and then we, being clever storytelling apes, work backwards and assign it a plot. The reason arrives after the event, not before it. That’s not the universe having a plan. That’s us having a narrator.

And I think that’s better. It means the good things weren’t rationed out by fate. When something wonderful happens, nobody owed it to me. It just showed up, free of charge. Meaning isn’t something you find in the wreckage. It’s something you build with it.