You are alone, after a long story experiencing grief and loss. Something bad has happened to you. Your life is not what you expected. You feel overwhelmed and out of control. You feel empty and you have no fuel left. You suffer, you feel miserable, like giving up. The whole world is against you.

Many of us feel that way, and we think everything goes wrong and has no meaning. But is that true? Life has really no meaning? Bad moments are really meaningless? Do we have to simply wait until the crisis is over? I believe that everything happens for one reason. If we believe that fate, destiny, chaos, determine our events, we end up thinking that we are not responsible of your lives, of our choices.

It is in our lowest points in life that we gain our strength. We understand white shadows because we compare them with dark colors. We appreciate life because we experience fear, death, dark moments. Without loss and grief, we wouldn’t be grateful for love. As the great poet Paulo Coelho said: “There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them. But they are there for a reason. Only when we have overcome them will we understand why they were there.”

Well before Coelho, the Greek Philosopher Aristotle also believed that everything has a cause. Every event that happens in your life is an opportunity for you to you grow and learn. As it happens for a caterpillar and a pupa before transforming in a butterfly. People come in your life for a reason. When you’ll understand that reason, you’ll be able to decide what to do with that person. It could be that you need something, and they are there to satisfy that need. They could help you, assist you, advise you.

Everyone, even the ones we think are negative persons in our path, is a gift. There is a reason for them to be there, and you need them and the fact that they are there, exactly in that precise moment. We have to learn from people and events. Maybe not everything is clear as things happen.

But we have to trust ourselves and our lives. As Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”