In this deeply personal episode of The Musings of a Fool, Arnold Watson reflects on what it truly means to survive.

After a murder-suicide took the lives of his mother and father and nearly took his own, Arnold entered adulthood carrying grief, trauma, displacement, and questions he did not yet know how to answer. His journey would include homelessness, heavy alcohol use, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, and periods when simply remaining alive was the only form of survival he could manage.

Still Here is not a story of easy triumph, nor an attempt to make suffering appear noble or necessary. It is an honest reflection on dignity, the misleading strength of the word “survivor,” and the possibility that healing may not mean erasing our wounds—but learning to carry them differently.

Arnold considers why grief cannot be ranked, how survival can be quiet and imperfect, and whether telling the truth about one wounded life might help another person feel less alone.

Perhaps the question is no longer, “Why did I survive?”

Perhaps it is, “What will I do with the life that remains?”

Content note: This episode includes discussion of murder-suicide, trauma, homelessness, heavy alcohol use, divorce, and suicidal thoughts.

In this episode of The Musings of a Fool, I reflect on one of the oldest and most repeated statements many of us have heard throughout life:

“Everything happens for a reason.”

For many years, I believed that statement. It offered comfort. It suggested that pain had purpose, that suffering was not wasted, and that somewhere behind the events of life there was a hidden order making sense of it all.

But in more recent years, I have begun to question whether that statement is actually true — or whether it sometimes gives us comfort at the expense of honesty.

This episode explores the difference between something having a cause and something having a purpose. Many things happen because of prior conditions: choices, history, character, systems, chance, biology, timing, and human behavior. But that does not necessarily mean every painful event was meant to happen, assigned to us, deserved by us, or morally necessary.

I also connect this question to the idea of karma. Is life governed by a perfect moral ledger where everyone eventually receives exactly what they deserve? Or is the truth more complicated? Character matters. Choices matter. What we sow often shapes what we reap. But not every suffering person is reaping what they personally sowed. Some people suffer because of what others have done, because of broken systems, because of illness, violence, betrayal, poverty, accident, or the fragile condition of being human.

The King James Bible also enters this reflection, especially Ecclesiastes, Job, John 9, Galatians, Romans, and Genesis. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time and season for all things, but also that “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Job challenges simplistic explanations of suffering. John 9 shows Jesus refusing to blame a man’s blindness on personal or parental sin. Galatians speaks of sowing and reaping, while Romans and Genesis suggest that good may be brought out of suffering without calling the suffering itself good.

The question, then, is not only whether everything happens for a reason.

The deeper question is whether human beings can create meaning from what happens without pretending every wound was necessary, deserved, or divinely assigned.

This episode is a meditation on cause, purpose, karma, Scripture, suffering, mortality, and the human search for meaning.

Perhaps the deeper truth is not that everything happens for a reason.

Perhaps the deeper truth is this:

Not everything that happens comes with a reason — but a human being can still live in such a way that meaning is born from it.

Thoughts on what the meaning of community is compared to a seemingly cold reality.