The Search Part 3 — Is Everything for a Reason?

This post is part of a series done for the publisher of my book. See the original here.

A lot happened in Hveragerði. A lot also didn’t happen. I was there for two weeks. I didn’t actually want to stay there when the time came, but Iceland has a housing crisis. If I canceled that stay, my only other choice would have been to leave the country. I had booked an apartment in Kópavogur for a month (basically Reykjavík), and I knew I wanted to be in a place with more people and more going on. But I had two weeks in Hveragerði to get through first.

If I had a car, things would have been different. Instead, I had to walk 20 minutes in gale-force winds to the grocery store with gravel blowing in my face. It also rained all day, every day. There was hail, too. It wasn’t a good time to go out and explore – or to go outside at all. So I stayed in.

I wasn’t entirely alone there. I knew two good people in the city, not terribly far away, and we did visit. After spending so much time in thought and isolation, these simple interactions ended up being quite profound. That is also its own story, but I quickly realized how my perception of both myself and other people had changed. Specifically, I began understanding why people are the way they are. It’s a difficult idea to express, one that I ultimately wrote a lot about in my book. Though the only thing that truly matters is accepting people as they are, yourself included.

It was also in Hveragerði that I realized I failed. I gave up my career and my education to chase a dream, and that dream didn’t work out. I was still determined to make Iceland work, however. I applied for jobs. I reached out for housing. But I never got any replies. I wondered what would come next. Things weren’t looking great.

When I made it to Kópavogur, I was invited to an event. The outcome of going, simply, was that I felt many things. Given everything that had led up to this event, I was overwhelmed. So, I wrote poems to work through it all as had become my practice.

I started with how a particular person I met had made me feel. But for the first time, a poem wasn’t enough. If a poem wasn’t enough, and a story was too verbose, then I decided to write in a new style entirely. I ended up liking that piece, so I began expressing all my ideas in a mix of this new style and regular stories. Thus, drawing from the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of my time in Iceland, You, Man, Emotion was written.

What I find most peculiar is the mentioned person – I had a dream about them before we even met. While I changed some details for the story, I Killed God is about questioning signs, symbols, and circumstances. The following is worth consideration: 

And that was the end… Was it all in my mind? Was it even real? Or was it me forcing my perfect story…

Ironically, I wrote the story weeks before “the end.” But at that point, I knew I was leaving Iceland sooner or later due to the job and housing situation.

There’s much more to the real story, involving many “signs and symbols,” even after leaving. I kept wondering whether such things were just my mind clinging onto patterns and “forcing my perfect story.” What matters, though, is not the truth or meaning of these signs and symbols; similarly, it doesn’t matter whether my dream was anything more than a regular dream; what matters is the outcome.

For me, that outcome was writing my book. 

The dream I had was significant enough to be the first dream I wrote down in three years. And this happened one week before I was even invited to the event. Then, every detail of that dream happened in some way or another – even the location was involved. Again, this could just be my mind grasping at patterns. And again, it really doesn’t even matter.

Because of this dream, I placed significance on this individual I met. That significance led to me feeling how I felt. That feeling led to me writing in a new style. That style led to me writing a book. That book led to me being here, at this moment, writing my story.

In a fantastical twist of fate, I am left asking not whether the dream had any significance. Rather, I am left asking a far better question: whether everything has significance.

The dream had meaning. It served a purpose. It impacted the events that followed. Whether it was “real” is completely irrelevant. If there was a reason for it, was that it? And what, then, of everything else in life? Does meaning come from the impact of events rather than events themselves? These are questions I can’t answer. All I can do is acknowledge the events in my life and how each one leads to the next. Whatever the meaning. Whatever the purpose.

After all, if I am me, not someone else, any place else, or any time else, then there must be meaning in that. So if who I am has meaning, then why not all the events that take place, no matter how “bizarre?”

What remains, though, is the question of why. I posed this question in I Killed God:

“...Everything that’s gone wrong, you could have made right…”

Things did go wrong. Many things. We may never truly understand why things go wrong. But it is up to us to learn, grow, and keep moving forward.

—

At this point, I have detailed the notable events of my time in Iceland. The ultimate outcome was failure. My goal, at the very least, was to build a life there. Instead, I had to leave due to a difficult job and housing market. In the end, I came away from Iceland with nothing. Nothing but experience.

But it was all those experiences and “failures” along the way that reshaped me as an individual. They showed me humanity in ways I had never considered. They showed me myself and others in ways I never thought possible. Even the “failures” of my own fault left me with many lessons – from learning how to communicate better, to learning to make an effort to understand my role in all that happens to me. And above all else, they showed me that there is no real failure.

One last point to consider: there are five people who played major roles in my time in Iceland, and not one of them has any idea of how they impacted me. All they ever did was be themselves. Consider your role in the lives of others – the lives you can change simply by being yourself. You would never know.

In any case, this is where my story ends as of this very moment. Now it is time for me to ask: what happens next?