An Olympic hopeful once told me that when his swimming career ended in a vehicular collision, it was all for the best since he was enjoying having a social life at last. I asked him if he ever still dreamed of gold in the hundred fly and he turned silent. We both knew that a lifetime of laser bowling nights couldn’t substitute for five minutes on the Olympic podium. Still he’d been brainwashed to say it, to believe: “everything works out in the end.”
He’s not alone. Kids cut from the chess team, laid-off pastry chefs, even espoused atheists can be heard spouting this dime store wisdom. It’s as if everyone grew up reading an extremely abridged version of Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman’s lines get cut simply to “What a simonizing job!”
The implication of the adage is double: first, an affirmation of a sort of destiny; then, that it’s aligned with what is good. Apparently, the apologists for this kindly fate have no truck with the neutrality of nature, or with the indifference of god.
So we have all these amateur authors, exploiting the ambiguity of the word “best,” narrating an abstract benevolence onto events any other creature might see as harsh and arbitrary. Perhaps they are correct. What is best we construct for ourselves. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s self-serving, how all the misery around us is meant to be for some greater good. As if it really were all a pantomime being played for our benefit. What is said then to the teenager succumbing to leukemia? This is for the best? We need you to die so we can learn from our own survival? So we can spend less time in hospital waiting rooms?
Things work out. But that’s about it.
Perhaps it’s the epitome of quaintness to quote a strummy sage, but, “They say God makes problems just to see what you can stand before you do as the Devil pleases.”
Isn’t the alternative fatalistic as well, in its way? To suggest that each of us has some grand purpose and that we’re irrevocably screwed if something prevents us from fulfilling it? “Everything works out for the best in the end” is shorthand for the belief that there are many things we can and will do with our lives, and all of them can be meaningful and fulfilling. Which seems to me to be a fine belief because, at the base of it all, what’s the alternative? Am I better off I model my life off of Willy Loman as written?
Also, there was this one episode of Who’s the Boss where Tony got to see what his life would be like if he had never injured his shoulder and thus had continued his baseball career. Despite having been World Series MVP one year, he was a miserable jerk. Who are we to dispute the sagacity of the Danza?
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