It's The End of the World as We Know It and I feel fine

Yesterday I took Cecilia to the babysitter and spent the day at my friends house solving all our problems and trying to make sense of the universe. The theme of the day was, "What do we really know to be true?" and "Is there such a thing as an non-disfunctional family?" The answer the Question 1: We know very little to be 100% true. Even what we think is true and definitely what others perceive as being true. Question 2: There is not a single family anywhere: rich, poor, black, white, educated or not, beautiful, ugly where in the family there does not exist some deep-rooted secrets or some level of "issues."

How did we arrive at these two themes. My friend had a certain awareness/perception of her family for her entire life. There were some positives, some negatives. A discussion with a family member this week revealed some very ugly family secrets that completely shattered what she "knew" about each and every member of the family. Almost 50 years old and POOF... it was the end of the world as she knew it!

At the end of the day, I broached the subject of God with her. She has been a lifelong atheist/agnostic (depending on the day). I have never tried to convince her otherwise but had always tried to plant the seed. She was sharing some "coincidences" that have occurred and finally I asked, "As you reflect on all of this, does it not seem as though there is something bigger than yourself?" Her reply was that she lost both grandfathers, a grandmother and her adored cousin all in the same year. How could a God exist? How could a God who loved everyone as he apparently did allow this and all the atrocities of the world to happen? This was an answer to which I had no answer. I drew on my beloved Paulo Coelho's philosophy and replied that to recognize beauty, you need to have seen ugliness. For good to exist, there HAS to be evil. To be happy, you MUST first know unhappiness. Life is nothing but things and their counterparts.

So after some reflection, today I read an article by Martha Beck in O Magazine, titled, The Wonder Years. I was struck by a line in which she wrote, "If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we avoid or ignore all evidence of anything that might change our mind." Hmm... was this a 'coincidence?' I think not.