Everything Happens for a Reason

They say everything happens for a reason.

I opened our hotel door at 4 AM to see Derek (Cajun) with his left eye swollen shut, and blood dripping from his left ear.

He was smiling.

“Don’t worry man, I got ‘em!”, he said, as he walked to the bathroom to check himself out. “There were three of them, I broke the first one’s nose, I smashed the second one’s head against a wall…” he trailed off as he looked at his wounded eye.

“What about the third one”

“He got me”, said Derek, as he wiped the blood from his face.

Keychain was sharing the room with Derek and I; he gave me a concerned look.

“You need to get your ass to hospital” I said.

Derek was exploring the wounds on his scalp, “Yeah… I know.”

They say everything happens for a reason, and I believe that. As bad as they were at the time, all my screw ups and failures and disasters have made me who I am today, and I’m pretty happy with that. But I’m having trouble figuring out why Cajun got beat up and robbed in Sydney Saturday night.

He got lost trying to walk back from the bar after the workshop, and wound up in an alleyway near the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Center. Three guys came out of nowhere (they had been hiding), and pushed him to the ground. They demanded his wallet, but instead of handing it to them, he got up fighting and took two out. The third got behind him and hit him in the back of the head with something hard; that was the end of the fight.

When he regained consciousness, he didn’t even remember who he was. Some good people at a pizza place helped him back to our hotel.

We took Derek to the emergency room, where he stayed all night. By 10am we had found out that his ocular socket had been broken, and that he wouldn’t be able to fly until he got surgery and healed for a week.  And because of the Easter holidays, he wouldn’t be able to get surgery for two weeks. So we were stuck in Australia for three weeks, with not much money and not much to do.

We hung around Sydney for a few days, but we quickly got bored. Derek’s eye was healing, but it would still pop out of his head if he flew in an airplane.  So we decided to rent a cheap camper van, and drive around Australia for a week or so till Derek gets his surgery. If everything happens for a reason, it doesn’t have to be obvious. Sometimes you need to look for that reason. So we drove up to Byron Bay. There’s a big festival going on here, and Ben Harper is playing.

Derek and I both decided that there’s no way the reason he got beat up was so that we could see a Ben Harper concert, so we’re still looking for our reason. We ran into some people we met in Sydney, and camped out next to the beach. It’s pretty nice.

We’ll be driving around the East Coast of Australia for 10 more days, before we go back to Sydney for Derek’s surgery. A week after that, we’ll be in Melbourne to give a free talk, run a bootcamp, and head back home. In the meantime, we’re still looking for our reason.

Thanks to everyone who offered support and concern, Derek’s doing pretty good right now, except for some headaches and frustration caused by not being able to go into the water. We’ll keep you posted.

Here’s our follow up post.