One evening I was sitting in an American Airlines jet at JFK. The plane was rolling slowly on the tarmac, awaiting its turn in a long line of flights ready to take off. After an hour’s wait, the pilot announced that the aircraft was returning to the terminal. The flight was canceled. Apparently, our flight crew had been working a long day, and if the flight had taken off after this long delay, they would have ended up exceeding the maximum work-hours they were allowed in one day by the federal aviation authority.

“Sorry, folks,” said the pilot, “There’s nothing we can do. It’s 10.30 pm, and there are no other flights to LA tonight, so you will need to rebook your flight for tomorrow. Get some good sleep. American Airlines will be providing you with a hotel room at the airport tonight.”

Murmurs, gentle protests and more vocal expressions of frustration broke out all over the plane. I gave a wounded look to the lady sitting next to me. This is so totally unfair, I thought, and there’s not even a villain at hand for us to punish for this!

The lady must have caught my train of thought. She turned to me, shrugged her shoulders and smiled serenely, “Everything happens for a reason.”

A reason?

The reason here, dear lady, is that JFK is terribly congested! That they need a better flight scheduling system! This airport is a hundred years old! I kept these thoughts to myself, smiling back at her half-heartedly. In the back of my mind, I concluded, “She is too relaxed about this”, then raced to call the airline number to ensure I got myself re-booked on the first flight out in the morning.

I waited for some time, but the passenger line to redeem the hotel coupons for the night was so long, I gave up. I was now going to have to go home — an hour’s cab ride on a Friday night — to get around 5 hours of sleep before taking a cab back early morning to the airport to catch my flight. “What an utter waste of an evening,” I thought.

When I arrived home that night, there was an odd smell in the air. After puttering around the apartment, I went over to the kitchen to turn on the gas stove and heat some food. And then, I froze.

Someone had already turned the gas stove dial on. That odd smell was the smell of gas, spread all over the apartment and even in the corridor.

I had tried to use the stove before I left for the airport, to warm some food. One of the stove units had not worked, so I had used another one. But in the rush of things, I had not turned off the gas on the first stove unit, I now realized.

Instantly, the lady’s voice replayed in my mind. “Everything happens for a reason.”

“You fool,” I told myself. “Divine Mother (which is my way of relating to the all-loving, omniscient force in the universe) has been working overtime the last few hours to find some way to get you back home to turn the gas off.”

The next moment, I was on my knees, stunned, grateful, at peace with the cards life had dealt me that evening.

The lady in the airplane had been my teacher that day. “Everything happens for a reason” is in fact my own life philosophy, but, in my impatience to get to LA and maximize my every moment, I had allowed myself to drift way out of my Core when the pilot announced the flight cancellation.

Do you believe you are occasionally prone to being hit by random acts of nature, by random happenings in the world, or do you believe there’s an invisible logic to everything you experience?

Could it be that one day you wake up, in this life or beyond, to a new understanding that reveals to you how everything that happened to you in this life was for a good reason, that a loving force was whispering to you through every experience, seeking to guide your every move in the arena of life? That at times it clips your wings because it wants you to return to your home within, to take care of important duties you have ignored in your rush to go out and play?

How might your life change if you were to not simply hold such a belief intellectually, but practice it in your everyday moments as you encounter life’s twists and turns, looking to find the hidden meaning in them all?

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from my spiritual teacher, Yogananda.

“…the magnificent painting of Creation stretches across the infinite canvas of time and space. Every object and event in nature is a masterful stroke of the Great Painter. But the ordinary person sees only confusing bits and pieces of these depictions. Consider everything that happens as a note in the symphony of the Cosmic Conductor. Individual notes seem meaningless until heard in relation to the whole composition. In the Creation’s cosmic magnum opus, which has been playing throughout all time, everything — storm, death, love, life — has its part in the medley. All unite in a universal rhythm of harmony…”

Warmly,
Hitendra

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