The speed and scope of the Internet can provide so much to us. Sports stats, TV spoilers, job opportunities, provocative thoughts, rare products, and overlong lists of things. It’s the Information Age, and information possessed by a person is called knowledge. Sweet, powerful knowledge. The curious and the hungry can find explanations for almost anything if they look. Almost.
Sometimes, you just don’t get any answers.
It is terrifying to be without knowledge. Not being able to make sense of something twists your stomach and melts your skin. Some dark beast at the periphery of your existence passed you up for a promotion, wrote you a Dear John letter of babbling incoherence, or ended the life of someone you love. Your attempts to connect the dots calls the whole design of your life into question. Where did I go wrong? What threads of perverse causality led me here? How is it narratively acceptable that I, the lovable hero of my own story, am flailing in helpless ignorance? When your search for meaning turns up nothing and you start to contemplate your irrelevance, you just hurt more. You receive (and probably have given before) half-answers and limp solace. It wasn’t the right time. It just wouldn’t work out. Shit happens. All men/women are scum. He’s in a better place. These thought-terminating clichés help no one. But here’s one that I think might see you through. It’s a revision of my Sweet Isolated Statement above.
Sometimes, you just don’t * need any * answers.
*insert expletives as appropriate to level of indignation
The universe is too big and mysterious for anyone to know everything, and too big and beautiful to waste time searching for rationalizations that are hiding from you or aren’t there at all. If you can muster the courage to celebrate life, love, time, beauty and earnest effort, you can make your own truth. There is no door so heavy that you can’t close it alone. You don’t have to be puppeted about by a cruel and hazy past. A lot of our past is a useless blur anyway.
You are in pain, no doubt. But how do you know an explanation would even help? You may just learn that hard work doesn’t pay, that you are not appreciated… it would actually be nice to have the doors slam shut on that kind of thinking. Instead of scrabbling for answers, ask new questions. You might not see them yet at your emotional nadir, but there are so many silver linings waiting to be woven into a coat for your chilling heart.
We may be owed explanations, but we aren’t slaves to them.