I don't remember where I picked this up (possibly from watching/listening to the Feynman lectures). Things don't happen because they "want to" so much as because they have no reason not to. Landslides, for example, don't happen because soil wants to slide down a slope but because when sloped areas become completely saturated by heavy rainfall there's no reason for the landlside not to happen. It may seem like a semantic distinction but as someone who was brought up by quite religious parents who believed everything happened by divine will this was a perspective changing way of filtering out this sort of belief. I found I could even apply this to deliberately engineered concepts like an atomic bomb for example. The bomb doesn't explode so much because someone presses a button but because pressing that button removes the reasons that the fisile material in it isn't exploding all the time. I like this idea because it paints a picture of a world filled with tremendous forces that don't do anything at the moment because they are balanced by opposing forces and that all you are doing when you apparently cause something to happen is removing one of those forces. It's basically been a way for me to understand the world better and swap God for Science... so yes, quite a perspective change lol.