Recently, I read, again, about the life of the Mongol chieftain Genghis Khan.  Although I was appalled at the bloodshed and carnage he unleashed upon the world, I was equally struck by the extent to which he enabled the Renaissance in western Europe.  By controlling and making safe passage between Europe and Asia, the great Khan, wittingly or not, sparked a flow and exchange of information and ideas that helped Europe to restore and revive itself in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages.  Were it not for the Khan's decimating conquests, his storied ability to level entire civilizations in the course of a day, the vast stretches of land between Europe and Asia would have remained impassable for many more centuries.  Europe would not have encountered and learned from the cultures of the Orient nearly as soon as it had and would not have thought to engage in exploration across the Atlantic when it did.  The world would have been a very different place.
     How ironic it is, then, that one of history's most violent individuals laid the groundwork for the birth of one of history's most brilliant eras.  We human beings try so hard to grasp what time and events mean and where everything is going, but our context and purview are so very small.  We rarely know how our actions will affect the generations that follow us.  Moreover, we rarely know when or how what we consider despicable turns out to enable something grander than we can imagine.
     But the life of finitude is like that.  We never know.  What we do know, however, is that reasons only exist when life itself has one.