This is the age old question isn’t it? This is the question that has perplexed philosophers since the beginning of time. There will definitely be people who come out on one side or another or there will be those who simply don’t know but remain open to either possibility. I certainly don’t pretend to have any definitive answers on the subject. There is a fun movie however, that certainly plays with this notion. The movie is called Miracles, released in 1986 it stars Tom Conti and Teri Garr.  

Warning Major spoilers ahead:

The movie begins in a remote jungle region where a tribal chief’s daughter is very sick and may be dying. The Tribe’s medicine man is trying to do his thing to save her and she gets only sicker. We then see him laying out in the rain as punishment for his failures. And doctors here think they have it tough.

Anyhow the tribal doctor pleads to the Heavens for a medicine man, “a real medicine man,” to come and get him out of his predicament and save the chief's daughter. 

The scene then changes to a man talking to his colleague about his finalized divorce. A few minutes later he gets into an accidental fender bender with his aforementioned ex wife. A series of crazy scenarios ensues with the bickering couple getting kidnapped by inept and funny robbers played by Christopher Lloyd and Paul Rodriguez. The unlikely group then wind up on a plane to a remote South American region. The series of events that follows: a crashed plane, dislodging a rock saving , a couple from a nefarious individual, random gunshots firing into the sky, killing a large bird, that feeds a starving family, a daring escape aboard a boat in a storm and suddenly we are back in the jungle from the beginning of the movie where a real medicine man has arrived to save a little girl’s life. 

I had read somewhere that the movie was panned by critics at the time but honestly I found it funny, charming and enjoyable and made me wonder how seemingly random events can truly be connected and how we really don’t realize the full impact we can have on each other’s lives and how an ordinary day or even an encounter we may at first see as something negative can lead to something extraordinary. So I challenge you as you go about your day and encounter different people and have a variety of experiences before you attach judgement to it, think to yourself, “Isn’t this interesting, I wonder how this could fit into a larger story.” You’d be surprised how this simple perspective shift could truly help your outlook. Now I thoroughly recognize that some experiences can be incredibly traumatizing and I am in no way minimizing those but I will say many times we get bogged down each day by petty annoyances or setbacks that if we just changed our perspective a tiny bit we would be happier people.