Not Planned. Required. — Alan Watts on Why Everything That Happened Had to Happen

The same midwife delivered both of us.

I didn't know this for years. Thao didn't know it either. We grew up one village apart in the Mekong Delta and had no idea the other existed. Our families left Vietnam through the same emigration channel — the Orderly Departure Program's Humanitarian Operation, a bureaucratic name for the route taken by families of soldiers and political prisoners after the fall of Saigon. We arrived in the United States separately, years apart, and eventually found each other through the overlapping social networks that form when a diaspora settles into a new place.

The rest surfaced slowly. The shared village proximity. The fact that our fathers — Tu and Tien — had fought on the same side in the same war. And then the midwife. The same pair of hands, in the same delta, had received both of us into the world. We were connected before we knew we existed.

What do you do with a fact like this?

The easy thing is to say: it was meant to be. Everything happens for a reason. There is a plan. But I have never fully trusted that answer, because it papers over too much — specifically, it papers over the suffering that produced the connection. The re-education camps my father spent years in. The families separated. The country torn. Calling all of that "the plan" feels like an insult to the people who paid the cost of it.

Alan Watts has a better answer. It is not more comfortable, exactly. But it is more honest, and I find it more satisfying.

The Two Versions of "Everything Happens for a Reason"

There are two ways to read that phrase, and they are very different.

The first is theological: there is a designer, a plan, a purpose. Events unfold the way they do because someone or something intended them to. This is the comfort version — it implies the suffering was necessary for a good outcome that someone had in mind. It puts a benevolent intelligence behind the chaos.

Watts did not believe this, at least not in any form that would satisfy a conventional theologian. He was too rigorous and too honest to paper over genuine suffering with the claim that it was all arranged for the best.¹

The second version is causal, and this is the one Watts found genuinely interesting: every event that has ever occurred was required for the present moment to be exactly what it is. Not because someone planned it. Because causality is total. The web of causes runs back through everything — every decision, every accident, every war, every birth — and the particular present moment you're in right now could not be this specific moment without every single one of those causes being exactly what it was.

This is different from a plan. A plan implies intentionality, a purpose, a desired outcome. What Watts is describing is something more structural: the past is not a series of isolated events. It is a web, and every strand in the web is required for the web to have its current shape.

Indra's Net

There is a metaphor from the Hindu tradition that Watts used often, and I want to describe it carefully because it is the clearest image I know for what he's pointing at.

Imagine a net stretched across the sky, reaching in all directions without limit. At every node where the strands intersect, there is a jewel. And each jewel reflects every other jewel — so that in each jewel you can see all the others, and in those reflections you can see the reflections of reflections, and so on, without end.

Indra's Net.²

This is a description of how causality actually works when you trace it back far enough. Every event is reflected in every other event. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is self-contained. If you want to understand any particular moment fully, you would have to trace its causes back through everything that ever happened — through every war, every migration, every meeting, every birth — because all of it contributed, in ways large and infinitely small, to this specific moment being what it is.

This is not mysticism. It is a description of the structure of causation. Thinh and Thao growing up in the same delta, being delivered by the same midwife, losing their families' country in the same war, emigrating through the same program — of course they ended up in the same place. The grain of both their lives, shaped by the same geography and the same history, was running in the same direction. Not because someone planned it. Because the web was already drawn, and they were both part of it, and the web had them crossing.

The delta from above — the Mekong spreading across flat land, the kind of geography that connects everything it touches. Two villages in this landscape were never really separate.

Tracing the Causes

Let me do the exercise. Let me actually trace back the causes, as precisely as I can, to see what was required for my family to exist in its current form.

Cody was born in 2026, the fourth child, the youngest. For Cody to exist, Thao and I had to meet. For us to meet, we both had to be in the United States, in the same city, in the same community. For that to happen, both our families had to emigrate. For both our families to emigrate through the specific channel they did — the Humanitarian Operation sub-program — our fathers had to have served on the Republic of Vietnam side of the war. For our fathers to have served, there had to be a war. For the war to end the way it did, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the specific sequence of events in the Vietnam War had to unfold as they did. Trace that back further and you're in the Cold War, in French colonialism, in a century of events that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with what we became.

The fall of Saigon was not a good event. My father spent years in a re-education camp afterward. Families were destroyed. A country was shattered. I am not going to call it good.

But — and this is where Watts forces honesty — without it, I don't exist. Thao doesn't exist as the person I know. Meghan, Claire, Emily, Cody — none of them exist. The specific family I am sitting in the middle of, tonight, is the product of a chain of causes that includes events I would not wish on anyone.

You cannot separate the outcome from the causes. They are one continuous event, viewed from different angles.

What This Is Not

I want to be clear about what this argument is not, because it is easy to misread it in a direction that I find genuinely repellent.

It is not saying that the suffering was worth it. It is not a justification for the war, or the camps, or the loss. The people who suffered through those events had their own lives, their own outcomes, their own chains of cause and consequence. Many of them did not get good outcomes. Tracing one chain of causes to a good outcome does not vindicate the event that set all the chains in motion.

It is not saying there is a plan. No one arranged for my father to go to a re-education camp so that I would eventually meet my wife in America and have four children. That is not what happened. What happened is that causes produced effects that produced causes that produced effects, without intention, without design, and this specific family exists at the end of one of those chains — while other families, shaped by the same events, ended at different places.

What it is saying is simpler and stranger: the present moment required the past. All of it. Every terrible thing and every ordinary thing and every beautiful thing in the chain leading here was a necessary condition for here being this. If you could change any of it — even the things you most wish had been different — you would not get this. You would get something else, probably something that had its own mixture of good and terrible, but not this specific thing.

Four kids in a frame — Meghan, Claire, Emily, Cody. Each of them is the end of an impossibly specific chain of causes. Each of them required the entire history of the world to be exactly what it was.

The Pattern Is Not a Plan

Here is where Watts is most careful, and I want to follow his carefulness.

A plan implies someone who did the planning. It implies that the outcome was the goal, and everything else was in service of the goal. This is a tempting way to think about a life — to look back at the chain of events and say: all of this was leading here. It was meant to be.

But Watts makes a distinction between a plan and a pattern. A plan requires a planner. A pattern just is. The universe has a pattern — a grain, as he calls it in the Taoist sense — and things that follow the grain produce outcomes that look planned from inside. Two people shaped by the same geography, the same history, the same war, the same diaspora — they have the same grain. Of course they converge. Not because it was written. Because the grain of both their lives was running in the same direction all along.

The difference between a plan and a pattern is the difference between a river being directed to the sea and a river flowing to the sea. In the first case, something is doing the directing. In the second, the river simply is what it is, and what it is includes flowing to the sea. No direction required. The shape of the terrain is enough.

Thao and I did not need a plan. We needed the same delta, the same war, the same program, the same country of arrival. The grain of the situation was already pointing us at each other. We just had to be alive, which — given everything — was not guaranteed, and which I do not take for granted.

Retroactive Meaning

There is a specific experience Watts talks about that I recognize completely.

You look back at your life and you see connections you couldn't have seen looking forward. The job you didn't get that led you to the job where you met the person who changed something. The illness that forced a slow-down that produced a realization. The loss that redirected everything. Looking forward, these are just things that happened — chaotic, unconnected, many of them unwanted. Looking backward, they form a line. They have, in retrospect, a kind of inevitability.

Watts says this is not an illusion. It is not our pattern-seeking minds making meaning out of randomness. The connections were real. The causes were real. The outcome was genuinely shaped by what preceded it. But — and this is the key — you can only see the pattern from the end of the chain. You cannot see it from inside it, looking forward, because the pattern is made of the whole thing, including the parts that haven't happened yet.³

This is why "everything happens for a reason" feels true when you're looking backward and feels empty when you're inside the suffering. Looking backward, you can see the chain. Inside the suffering, the chain isn't visible — only the suffering is. Both observations are accurate. They are just views from different points in the pattern.

What to Do With This

Watts is not offering comfort exactly. He is offering orientation.

If the present moment required everything — if the specific family in this house, tonight, is the exact and necessary outcome of every event in the chain leading here — then what? What follows from this?

One thing: a different relationship to the past. Not acceptance in the sense of approving of what was bad. But recognition that the bad is structurally inseparable from the good, and that wishing the bad away is also, whether you recognize it or not, wishing the good away. The people I love most are the product of things I would not choose. The life I have is the product of a history I cannot endorse in full. These two facts are not in conflict. They are the same fact viewed from different angles.

Another thing: a different relationship to the present. If this moment required everything, then this moment has a kind of weight to it — a density. It is not arbitrary. It is not random. It is the specific outcome of an impossibly specific chain, and it is the only moment that is actually here. Everything that made it possible is already done. The only live question is what you do with it now.

Watts would add: even what you do with it now is part of the pattern. The chain continues. Every choice you make is part of the web that will produce what comes next — for your children, for the people they will know, for whoever is writing a post like this forty years from now trying to make sense of how they ended up where they are.

The meaning of things is not somewhere behind them, waiting to be discovered. It is in them, woven through them, inseparable from what they are. The reason for a thing is the thing itself, fully seen.

The Midwife

I keep coming back to the midwife.

She didn't know she was doing anything remarkable. She was doing her job, in a delta village, delivering babies. She delivered one, then later delivered another, and they were not connected in any way she would have recognized. They were just two more births in the ordinary run of a life spent helping families through a particular doorway into the world.

She had no idea that those two births, one village apart, would eventually produce a marriage in a country she had probably never been to, four children she would never meet, and a family that would not exist without her specific presence at two specific moments in the 1970s in the Mekong Delta.

This is Indra's Net. Every jewel reflects every other. Every action radiates outward through the web in ways that are invisible at the point of action and only become visible much later, from far away, if you happen to be in a position to look back and trace the threads.

Most of the time, most of us are not in that position. We are in the middle of things, making decisions whose consequences we cannot see. The midwife did not know. My father did not know, going into the camps, what chain of events would eventually come out the other side. Thao's parents did not know, fleeing the country, that they were also moving toward a family they hadn't met yet.

Watts would say: this is not a reason to despair at the unknowability of things. It is a reason to act well in the present, with the knowledge that the present is part of a web you cannot see the full extent of. You cannot plan the whole thing. But you can be careful about the threads you're adding to it.

Cody

He is four months old. He doesn't know any of this yet.

Someday I will tell him about the midwife, and about the delta, and about the war that the adults in his family lived through before he arrived. I will tell him that his existence required an impossibly specific series of events, most of which were beyond anyone's control and some of which were genuinely terrible, and that the fact that he is here — specifically him, not some other version of a child — is the exact outcome of all of it.

I don't know what he'll make of this. He might find it heavy. He might find it clarifying. He might not think about it at all, which would also be fine.

But I find, when I think about the chain — the midwife, the delta, the war, the camps, the emigration program, the community, the meeting, the four children — I find that I am less able to hold the past in resentment than I once was. Not because the bad things weren't bad. They were. But because the bad things are so completely interwoven with everything I would not trade that I cannot hate them cleanly anymore. They are part of the same cloth.

Watts called this the recognition that the universe is not divided into the acceptable and the unacceptable, the planned and the random, the meaningful and the arbitrary. It is one continuous event, which includes all of it — the suffering and the midwife and the meeting in America and the baby who is currently asleep in the other room, which required all of the above, which required everything before that, which required the Mekong to flow exactly where it flows.

Everything happens for a reason. The reason is everything.