Life is happening for us
Not to us, for us. Naoufal's most repeated line, and the idea of filters that decides how we live the same events.
Life is happening for us
Naoufal
Naoufal wrote this line three times in one set of notes. It is the closest thing he has to a rule.
For, not to
The difference is one word. If life happens to us, we are the victim of it. If life happens for us, every event, even a painful one, carries something we need. Naoufal puts it bluntly in his piece on The Color Purple: “grateful for what happens for us (not to us, that’s for victims)”.
Filters
In the same piece he explains why two people can live the same event and come out with two different lives. We see life through filters. With a hate filter, we see people hating us. With a victim filter, we see people abusing us. With a love filter, we see things exactly as they are: why each and every one of us is doing what they are doing. The filter does not change the event. It changes what the event becomes.
He points to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: people who lived the same concentration camps came out with radically different meanings, and so with different lives.
Life is perfect
From there, Naoufal goes one step further: “Life is perfect.” Not pleasant, not easy, perfect: everything is already in the right place for what each person came to experience. He writes that “we chose to be born on a family to experience something”.
The other view
Some events are simply cruel, and telling a person in pain that it is “for them” can hurt. This idea is something to apply to your own life, not something to hand to someone else’s grief.
One thing to try
Pick one hard thing from your past. Finish this sentence: “This happened for me because…” Don’t force an answer. Wait for it.
