The Incarnated Soul...

Each new incarnation is planned in advance with the help of one's spiritual guides and masters. A review of past faults and weaknesses is made in close consultation with one's guides, and plans are made for major opportunities to occur during the forthcoming lifetime for testing and overcoming those various weaknesses. These events can appear to occur quite arbitrarily and unexpectedly during that lifetime, and some will even be quite traumatic, causing the personality to blame the "fates" for any "misfortune". And yet all these events will have been planned previously on higher levels to manifest at some time during the soul's earthly lifetime by the soul itself and are not, as might appear to us at the time, the result of an arbitrary whim of an uncaring Fate or God.
When incarnating on Earth the soul makes a contract with itself and with its spiritual guides and the Lords of Karma to undertake an Earth life of a certain duration in order to learn specific lessons.
If the incarnated soul finds the lessons too difficult and decides to terminate that life prematurely by suicide, the lessons are not thereby avoided, only postponed. The soul will have to go through the lengthy process of death and rebirth again in order to return and live out those remaining years and learn those lessons previously avoided. This explains why we have a deep-rooted instinct that suicide is fundamentally wrong; not only is it a betrayal of one's higher-self's evolutionary plan, but it is also a misuse of the facilities and opportunities given to us by our Creator and His Hierarchy.
A wider understanding of the multiple concept of free choice, karma and re-incarnation will make it easier for us to understand in turn the "drama of life" and the fundamental nature of suffering.
The drama of life has a purpose: It is to teach, to evolve our consciousness. Everything that happens on the plane of Earth happens not by chance but because we have attracted it to ourselves through our behavior in this or in past lives, and have consciously accepted the challenge it represents. It is widely understood that the concept of free will allows us to choose how we will react to given circumstances; it is important to realize however, that we also exercise free will in our choice of the challenges we agree to undertake during each incarnation. Through free will we choose our challenges and lessons; through free will we choose how we react to them.
It is difficult for those who do not accept the concept of reincarnation, of life after life after life, to see how suffering can be regarded as an evolutionary process. But when reincarnation is accepted as an integral part of one's view of evolution, it is easy to understand that we bring into being with each new physical body all that we have created in other Earth lives, and on other levels of existence beyond the physical plane of Earth. We bring with us not only our spiritual wisdom, but also the sins of the past, the lessons we have not learnt, the karma we owe both to ourselves and to others. So as we advance through the life which we now lead we will automatically attract to ourselves the lessons which we have chosen to learn, the karma we have chosen to transmute.
Thus there is no such thing as a tragedy by chance. Everything that happens on the plane of Earth has reason, has purpose. We live in a world in which many people apparently experience great tragedies. Tragedy comes to people either because they chose it for their destiny path or because it will present them with a lesson in life which they have yet to learn. Tragedy is the working-out of cause and effect; as we experience the effects, so we learn to change the cause. The experience of tragedy also teaches sympathy and compassion, the ability to accept and absorb the minor imperfections others, that they may in turn do the same for us.