The Search for Reasons

 Can a person ever really find an answer to "why" things happen as they do? I thought about this over the lunch hour today, and my conclusion is  a resounding no. Even if someone with magical powers gave me some explanation as to why things turned out the way they did (perhaps due to a previous life), I would still need to trust that person on faith unless I had some direct access to the information this person was providing. But even in the event that what this person was saying were true, what value does knowing the why have, unless it has some impact on how I behave or what future decision I make? I begin to realize that there are limitations to the explanation of "why" which have to be borne in mind.
  Of course, sometimes it is necessary to seek closure on certain things, and people certainly have a reason to look for explanations as to why they lost something, why an accident happened and who or what is responsible, etc. But the point is that none of these questions ever really quite answers the question of "why did this happen to me?" There may not be any ultimate answer to this question other than to know that it did and that there are always ways of looking at it in retrospect, similar to how a flower blooms. We never know what it is really going to look like until, when it is finally flowered, we can see in retrospect how its seeds contained the potentials for its current state. Rather than looking for answers to explain the future, I personally prefer to use the future to make sense of the past.