Things Happen.

My friend Tim thinks the band Dawes sucks, which is wholly incorrect: it is, in fact, Tim who sucks.

As proof of his ignorance – and as a tribute to Dawes’s lyrical acumen – I offer the profound simplicity of 2015’s “Things Happen,”  the lead track from the band’s fourth studio album, All Your Favorite Bands, and a cerebral investigation into the human condition penned by frontman and lead songwriter Taylor Goldsmith. 

Here, Goldsmith sings, “Things happen. That’s all they ever do.”

Over and over again throughout the song: Things happen. That’s all they ever do.

…now, admittedly, I can see the argument where something as blisteringly obvious as, “Things happen, that’s all they ever do” might not be considered once-in-a-generation lyricism (rocks-for-brains-Tim would certainly make that case), but this surface-level interpretation belies deeper considerations and undermines the all-encompassing, Zen brilliance of these seven simple words.

Allow me to refute. 

In human life – from the vey moment we’re born to the very moment we die – things happen. Quite literally, that’s all they ever do, and from any sensible perspective, this lyric is logically infallible: even in the moments when we colloquial say we’re “doing nothing,” blood flows, hearts beat, breath breathes, oceans swell, plates shift, moons orbit, worlds spin, stars burn, and the universe continues its endless, unexplainable expansion outwards into infinity. There has never been a moment between the Big Bang and now where things were not happening – from subatomic, microscopic things to enormous, otherworldly things, which are beyond our conception in either direction.

Moreover, all of these things are happening indiscriminately and universally to all of us, at all times: they’re happening to everyone capable and incapable of reading these words, to all those who find their way to this sentence, as well as to the roughly 7.88 billion others who never will.

By the very nature of existence, things happen. That’s all they ever do. 

The problem is not that things happen; it’s that things happen to us, and from the narrow perspective of an individual human being, we tend to take these happenings rather hard. 

But the things that happen to us aren’t unique. 

In fact, they’re not even personal.

The Buddha (who was an enormous Dawes fan, by the way) most fundamentally discussed this in the First Noble Truth – known in Pali as dukkha, meaning the truth of suffering or dissatisfaction. Life, the Buddha asserted, contains suffering, which he categorized into three different forms: dukkha-dukkha, viparinama-dukkha, and sankhara-dukkha. The first suffering, dukkha-dukkha, refers to the inevitable pain and discomfort of being alive, which invariably touches all living beings, and comes to include aging, sickness, death, being separated from loved ones, being around people you don’t really like, not getting what you want, and getting what you don’t. 

When you land on this earth, these things will happen…and my guess is all but one (since reading tends to be an activity best-suited for the living) already have. 

So raise your hand if, from the womb until now, you’ve avoided aging, have never fallen ill, or if your life has not been affected by death. 

…and raise it even higher if you think you have a way to avoid the inevitable end of human life that has afflicted 100% of those that have ever been born.

The big three here – aging, sickness, and death – are topics addressed by Dawes and the Buddha alike, and on the title track of their fifth studio album, We’re All Gonna Die, Goldsmith sings, “So try not to get upset, everything is fine/Hey, it's not that big a deal, we're all gonna die.”

Depending on your interpretation, this lyric might come across a little macabre, but an unwillingness to acknowledge death doesn’t make it any less a fact of life, and in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare makes the same point as Dawes, writing, “It seems to me most strange that men should fear [death], seeing as death – a necessary end – will come when it will come.”

The Enlightened One echoes the same point in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, where the story goes that a mother named Kisa Gotami loses her only son. Refusing to believe his death, Kisa Gotami seeks medicine to revive him, but is mocked by those she counsels. Eventually, she’s told by a villager to seek the help of the Buddha, and carrying the boy’s corpse, she asks the Buddha to save her son. He agrees, but needs very specific medicine: a handful of mustard seed, which “must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, spouse, parent, or friend."

In her grief, Kisa Gotami quickly heads for the nearby village, going from door to door and asking each family if they have lost a loved one. Repeatedly, each household confirms that they have, and as her hopeless journey for the mustard seed continues, she comes to realize the ubiquity of death: "Alas, the living are few, but the dead are many…How selfish am I in my grief! Death is common to all; yet there is a path that leads to immortality for those that have surrendered all selfishness."

When she returns to the Buddha, he confirms and expounds upon what she has learned, saying, “There is not any means by which those that have been born can avoid dying; after reaching old age there is death; of such a nature are living beings. As ripe fruits are early in danger of falling, so mortals when born are always in danger of death. Both young and adult, both those who are fools and those who are wise, all fall into the power of death; all are subject to death. The world is afflicted with death and decay; therefore, the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world.

“Not from weeping nor from grieving will any one obtain peace of mind; on the contrary, their pain will be greater and their body will suffer…yet the dead are not saved by this lamentation. Those who seek peace should draw out the arrow of lamentation and complaint and grief. Those who draw out the arrow and have become composed will obtain peace of mind; those who have overcome all sorrow will become free and be blessed."

Things, it turns out, happen. Death included.

That’s all things ever do – they happen – and while the bad news is that this end eventually comes for us all, the good news is that this isn’t doesn’t happen to us alone: it isn’t unique, it isn’t personal, and there is a way through, if we can accept the nature of things, instead of arguing with what is.

The same is true for the rest of dukkha-dukkha: at times, we all find ourselves separated from loved ones and surrounded by people we don’t really like; we all have days where we don’t get what we want, and days where we get far too much of what we don’t. 

Unfortunately, we just see that things happen to us, when the bigger story is that things happen.

If we can zoom out, we need not take it so personally: it’s not that big a deal. Everything might be fine.

Or, as Dawes poignantly says, “Let’s make a list of all the things the world has put you through, let’s raise a glass to all the people you’re not speaking to. I don’t know what else you want me to say to you: things happen, that’s all they ever do.”

…and while I don’t recommend saying this to your spouse when they come home after a long week of work, it does highlight just how often we argue about how things should be, when they happen, rather than learning to flow with how they are, as they happen.

When we get bogged down in the specifics of our individual predicaments, we argue with what is: we attach, resist, cling, push away, and in the end, we suffer. 

So what else do you want me to say to you? Things happen.

That’s all they ever do.

Which settles it: Dawes is transcendent, and Tim has rocks for brains.