If Something Happened, it had to Happen

By definition.
If it didn't have to happen, it wouldn't have happened.
Everything that happened up to this very moment was inevitable.
Otherwise we would have avoided it.
So is free will an illusion?
I think so - but an inevitable one!

Importance

Importance is relative, not absolute.
Something is important to me only because I believe that it is important to me.
Something that is important to someone else may be (and probably is) of no importance at all to me, and vice versa.
Art has the capacity of making something that was important to the artist important to the audience of his or her art.
Most things that we think are (or will be) important to us turn out to be quite unimportant, in retrospect.

Mistakes and Errors

In an op. ed. piece by a cognitive scientist I once was exposed to the distinction between mistakes and errors.
A mistake is when you step on the accelerator rather than the brake.
An error is believing that accelerators are brakes.
Why do people persist in error?
Because they have too much invested in it to let it go.
We unconsciously believe that we will be unhappy if we abandon the error, but we don't realize that the error is the cause of our unhappiness.
We think that if we abandon the error, our lives will be empty, but we don't realize that the error merely masks the emptiness of our lives and prevents us from living meaningfully.