Into being.

"All of us exist because of a series of tragedies and flukes." ~ Emily Yoffe, My Husband's Other Wife.

The words gave me pause, as did the story.

It's true. We wouldn't be were it not for each and every experience that led us into being. We can't regret our tragedies or mistakes in life, because they are what help shape our outcomes.

Do things happen for a reason?

I think to an extent, they do. I used to believe that reason was "fate". Some God planned fate that awaited all of us. It was what I was brought up to believe. My experiences in life, however, have led me to a different "fate" than anything I could imagine a higher being mapping out for me at my birth. Fate to me now is less as a planned existence and more as just a current set of circumstance or ending. If you're doing it right, things DO happen for a reason: if you're learning from your mistakes, appreciating your joys, and having no regrets.

Regrets are, in my opinion, just lessons unlearned.

We all make mistakes in life. We all have our 'coulda 'shoulda 'woulda moments, don't we? We all have our momentary feelings of regret for something we've either said or didn't say, do or didn't do. But if you hang on to that regret, you lose the lesson you should have learned.

I've learned a lesson, or two.

I could have finished college, but I became a working single mother instead. I should have visited my grandparents more, but I didn't and by the time I was 26, they were all gone. I would have kept in touch with my best friend better, had I known the burdens she carried were so heavy that she'd commit suicide. I could have wallowed, easily. And to be honest - I have, and did, for a while. But, c'mon - I raised a child alone. How resilient am I? I had grandparents for 26 years, while my husband never had one in his whole life. Losing one of my best friends ... well that one is tougher to get over - and I'm not sure I ever will - but I can say out of that, I have appreciated those remaining in ways I couldn't before, simply because I didn't know that I wasn't.

Tragedies, they did precede me.

My Opa died in WWII - or was declared MIA and presumed dead - as a German soldier whose whole platoon was driven into quicksand as they fought on the cold, unforgiving Russian front. Had he not met such a fate, my Oma would not have met the Opa that I knew, an American soldier. She would have never moved her family to the states, my father never would have never followed, joined the Army and got stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana where he met my mother in New Orleans. My mother may have never made her way to New Orleans with her girlfriends - where she would meet my father - had it not been for her rebelling and running off to first marry and subsequently divorce a sailor.

Today - some 51 years later - I am a culmination of their happenings, adding to it 38 years of my own.

I'm married to a man that I met in a bar that I went to because my friends thought they needed to get me out, away from the blues that beset me after my prior boyfriend moved across the country the week before. We may have never found common ground had it not been for the fact that I lived on the very street in the very neighborhood that his ex and son lived at the very same time, just five or six houses down. I might have never gotten over the fact that he is six years younger than me, had I not first lost someone else due to my taking too seriously a similar age difference. And, of course, if none of that happened at all - we would have never had that cute, dimpled, beautiful child of ours that lights my darkest days.

We exist, I believe, in both spite and celebration of what could have been and what is as a result.

Just as the Dalai Lama suggests that our enemies provide us with a precious opportunity to practice patience and love, so should we be grateful to our own tragedies that they provide us with a precious opportunity to learn and grow, into being.