Everyone, all of us, wants to know the cause.

Because, it stands to reason, that if we know the cause, we will know the cure.

And the prevention.

Homelessness is caused by laziness.  Bad luck.  Stupidity.  Drunkenness.  Karma.

Illness is caused by genetics.  Nutrition.  Stress.  Offending God (or the gods).  The health-stricken man or woman is getting his or her “just desserts” for being a workaholic or an asshole or a bitch… or for simply being weak.  (And thus, such people should be avoided.  Or at the very least, we should only talk to them once things have turned around for them.)

Good things happen because we are good people.  Blessed.  Hardworking.  Virtuous. Smart. God-loving.  God-fearing.  Strong.  Favored.  Chosen.  Lucky.

And maybe that’s believable, maybe, as long as you are born into a country where upwards mobility is possible and you find affluence and health and you manage to stay that way.  (And you wear blinders.)

But, sooner or later, the bubble has to pop.

You see, my friends, I know what I’m talking about.  I’m no stranger to bad luck.  (I’ve been abused.)  And really good luck, too.  (I was “the pretty one” born into an affluent, respected family.)

And then, more really, really, bad luck.

I’ve analyzed it and meditated on it, and thought about it six ways to Sunday.

And here’s what I think:

I think you can take all our self-serving beliefs (and self-limiting beliefs) about what causes good things to happen to certain people and why some people have terrible things happen to them…

…and shove them.

Because here’s the thing:  When you attribute good life events to hard work or to respecting God, when you imply that some people are blessed in some way, or are “chosen” or “favored,” then the very strong implication is that those who experience misfortune have “earned” it, too, or somehow lost God’s favor.

Now, I’m not saying things aren’t connected.  They are indeed.  Things are connected in complex, miraculous, beautiful ways that we can’t fathom.

And that’s the key:

That we can’t fathom.

When we start to try to pinpoint them, to fathom them, to draw conclusions and causation, we mess up.  We confuse ourselves.

We put ourselves on a false and unsteady pedestal.  If we fall, we’ll either have to hypocritically excuse ourselves, or we’ll suddenly have to consider that perhaps we aren’t, after all, God’s favorites.

When we draw simplistic causation, we alienate people.  We teach our children wrongly.

So stop it.  Stop saying stupid, self-aggrandizing things.

We can work our butts off, and we can be smart as a whip, and there’s no guarantee that things will work out.  That we’ll succeed.

And if that happens to you, it doesn’t mean that you’ve pissed off God, or that you deserve it.

It means that success didn’t happen.  Period.

(At least this time.  Keep trying or open yourself up to trying something new.)

Dropping our obsession with causation means that we stop torturing ourselves when things don’t turn out well.

And we stop patting ourselves on the back because we’re healthy, wealthy, or otherwise.

A couple weeks ago, I made a call to a woman who refers to herself as a “healers healer.”  Basically, she acknowledges that she does the work of helping to heal the healers, so that they can go back out and help other people.

She did a distance reading of me, and a spiritual healing, and yes, my fellow skeptic and scientific friends, she was psychic and legit and as real as you or I. She saw things she couldn’t have possibly seen or known, etc, etc.

I eventually told her of my daughter and I’s story. Like the other psychics and healers (including myself), whom I have consulted regarding my daughter and her apparent inability to make her own red blood cells, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with her.”

Nothing has been so mystifying.  After all, if nothing is indeed “wrong,” why is she slowly dying every month by not making her own blood?

The healer said other things too, like, “Of course, you know that the answer you’re looking for will not come from Western Medicine; it cannot cure her.”

She noted the cloud of sorrow around me, of the grief I carry. She helped me let some of it go.  I cried a lot.

I told her how I had realized a wound of some sort in the maternal family line.  How I had prayed, while pregnant, that my daughter would be freed from it.  But in doing so, it had not occurred to me that “breaking free” would mean that we would go so deeply into it.  I could not have imagined DBA.  I had thought it was an emotional, mental, energetic problem.

And how foolish of me!  Of one who knows the connections between the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.  How foolish… I guess I had not ‘known’ the connection deeply enough, or I never would have asked for my child to be freed from it.  Especially because I know that to be free of anything, you must go into (or through) the challenge.  You must transform it, and thus yourself.  You don’t get to just identify it and bypass it.

And of course, this ultimately led to my supposition that I caused this problem for my child.  Through improper handling of stress, diet, or even just thinking that something was wrong at all.

At which point, she said to me:

“Erika, you did not cause this.  There is nothing you could have done.  Please hear me:  You did NOT cause this.  

You’re psychic.  You read this.”

You read this.

I have never once had anyone say those word to me.  It was immediately soothing to my tormented heart.

And I think back, now, to how so many things seemed to conspire against me in that pregnancy.  I was in a car accident in the 2nd month.  I worked in a detox center and was surrounded by people emitting toxins.  I moved in with a partner who was stressed about a job he felt “stuck” in.  I was finishing my 4th year of graduate school and a masters thesis and was taking board exams. A stressful family visit made me feel angry, sad, and isolated.

And that’s not all.

It seemed like no matter what I did, I couldn’t have a peaceful, uneventful pregnancy.  I chose novels to read at random, and they turned out to be about the holocaust, about sacrificing and abandoning one’s own children, about miscarriage, and about infanticide.

In the third trimester, my right kidney failed, repeatedly, flooding my body with pain neurotransmitters and stress hormones, and my right chi pulse, the one carrying the pulse of my child, dropped out with it.

Yet, the whole while, I tried to do the right thing.  I went swimming.  I stretched.  I meditated.  I did reiki and self-healing.  I did qi gong.  I laughed.  I played.  I finally found books that were safe (PG Wodehouse… an author of nothing but ridiculous British humor) and stuck to them, refusing to take chances on any other novels.  I obtained the minimum necessary board certification and gave up pursuit of additional certifications (much to the ridicule of my ego).  I stopped interacting with anyone who seemed to not understand me or stress me out.

I took fabulous semi-nude and naked pictures of myself and my belly/baby.  I received chiropractic care, acupuncture, and massage.  I made myself healthy meals.   The moment I sensed something was wrong, I sought the advice and herbs of a master Chinese herbalist for pregnancy.  I sat in the garden.  I sang songs.  I wrote a journal to my baby, and poems, and stories.  I went bravely into a completely natural childbirth.

There is nothing you could have done.  You read this.

Will I let myself believe that?  Will I let myself accept that?

Will I let myself off the hook for my daughter’s illness?

Will I believe that her embodiment of DBA, this illness, is somehow necessary? That the fates or Gods or whoever, had destined this for us, and that no matter how prepared I was, no matter how vast and varied the tools I knew and know to promote a healthy pregnancy, that my efforts would be foiled?

That my daughter chose this life, this challenge, like a warrior choosing to enter the fray?

That it is part of some sort of plan?

That I read this?

That I tried my best to change our fates, but I could not, for it was not the cup for me to take away?

I think so.

Yes.  I might.

I do.

And do I believe that because you have not been stricken down, that because you are affluent, or healthy, or have survived your “health scare,” or have otherwise have emerged triumphant in life, that you are the blessed, the hard-working, the favored, the righteous?

No. No, I do not.

But you are lucky, my friend.  Know it and be humble, generous, and kind.
For fortunes can change overnight.

And Life is Paradox.

Yes, we have power in our lives.  We can make choices.  And these choices do affect us, and the people we love.

But we are also part of something larger.  Something that we do not control. (If we did, we would all be wealthy and immortal, would we not?)

We are not THE creators of the universe.  We are co-creators.

We have enormous power and we are mere servants.

There is Free Will and there is Destiny.

It’s not one or the other.  Its both.

And trust me, I get it:  It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around.  It is, in fact, unfathomable.

And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  Because it’s the way it is.

It’s part of the mystery, and part of the beauty.

And honestly, I’m not sure, but I think we might be lucky to be here at all.