I have great skepticism when people employ cognitive clichés such as: ‘meant to happen’ or ‘happens for a reason’. Firstly, meant to happen doesn’t make sense unless there’s a structure of ‘supposed-to-isms’ that guides all events. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, not to mention impossible because it would self-conflict. As for ‘happens for a reason’, the same kind of thing obtains, except this is even more absurd since only humans use, create, and understand reasons. Reasons are a human-order phenomenon, and they are the creations of the narrative aspects of our consciousness which is an inveterate liar, not to mention hopelessly reductive (throws away 99% of the event in order to produce the shining reduction it wants to make into god).

So, bluntly, I don’t think things are ‘meant to happen’, and nor do I believe ‘they happen for a reason’. At the very least we would need to radically change the language to account for the forces these extremely clumsy clichés want to foist upon us, because these forms seem both ridiculous and impossible.