Hansel and Gretel / Anne and Viktor
This beautiful,
Terrible,
Everyday life
Holds within its berth
All the joy
And tragedy
Of dawn and midnight
Of gain and loss,
Of love and despair,
Of refuge and genocide,
Of promiscuous compassion,
And the unfathomable cruelty
We cast like nets
Over the world's last doves.
A canon of fairy tales
Only glimpses
The tangle of briars and roses
In every person's
Every day.
And still the grass grows.
Buds push through snow.
And ants crawl in their dark labyrinths.
Not caring —
Or even knowing —
The stories we spin
To give meaning
To our unique
Prolific
Pedestrian experiences.
The story of humanity
Is told
In Black Forest evildoers
With their child-roasting ovens,
Cunning wolves
And ravenous kings,
Deadly and forbidden apples
Provided by parents,
And narrow escapes,
Told again and again
Throughout the ages.
The bough breaks.
The cradle falls.
And we wonder
At a violent world
That makes sense
To every creature
But man.
In 2013 we started getting to know our neighbors, Zach and Becca. Zach was a promising young medical student who was known for his community service and humanism. He had been studying neuroscience and dreamed of becoming an emergency room doctor. He introduced himself to us after recognizing my husband from a psychiatry lecture he’d given at the University, and we instantly hit it off, scheduling a dinner for a few weeks later. Zach then introduced us to his fiancée, Becca, who was an outdoors enthusiast, survivalist, and internationally-known river guide. They were both in their twenties, yet already making a difference, and they were very much the picture of a loving duo. If ever there was a couple with a bright future, this was it.
And then, just a few weeks later, Zach got caught in a sudden dust devil that grabbed his paraglider and whipped him violently to the ground. Witnesses said that it was a clear and beautiful day, perfect for paragliding, and Zach was only about eight feet up and getting ready to land when it “looked like the hand of God just grabbed Zach and slammed him into the ground.”
He died that day.
It was a shock to everyone, and his death was grieved by many. Becca decided to continue with her plans to lead a major exploration down a remote river in Mongolia, and so the house, once so vibrant with love and laughter, sat empty for what seemed like years.
“Why did this happen?”
“How could this happen to such an amazing person?”
“Where is God in all of this?”
These were questions everyone was asking, but no one could answer. I have a feeling we have all asked these questions from time to time. In fact, theodicy is an entire theology and philosophy built around the question of how a loving and all-powerful God can let bad things happen to good people. If God is good, then how can God allow evil to exist?
This question has been a central theme in entire schools of thought, engaging some of history’s major philosophers from Plotinus to Immanuel Kant. It’s also a question a lot of my friends are asking lately. As I wrote a few weeks ago, several of my closest friends are having seasons of intense loss. One’s stepfather died by suicide. Another opened her heart to new love after losing her husband a few years ago only to fall in love, start a new life, and then lose her fiancée to a heart attack. Another has faced back-to-back tragedies: a sudden and heartbreaking divorce, severe injuries requiring surgery he can’t afford, having to sell off beloved treasures just to survive, losing his income when one of his major clients died, the loss of many of his friends, and now, as I write this, his mother is in a coma, about to undergo a second surgery from a sudden and catastrophic brain aneurism. And all of that has happened just in the past few months.
And yet this friend is a Buddhist priest who has devoted his life to peace, beauty, love, teaching, and healing. I doubt he has ever hurt another person on purpose. He is a good man.
I went through a similar season of loss from 2009-2011. My therapist at the time listened to me explain the latest tragedy — I don’t even remember which one it was at this point — with her mouth growing more and more agape. She then said, “I really don’t know how you are so damn resilient. Any of my other patients would have had to have been institutionalized by this point.”
During those years of loss, it felt like I’d make some progress crawling out of that pit of despair only to have a cosmic boot come kick me in the face again, and I’d fall back down to the bottom.
People in similar situations have the same types of questions:
“Why is this happening to me?”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“How could God let this happen?”
“What am I supposed to learn from all of this?”
“Why am I being tested so severely?”
And more recently, “What have I done to attract this?”
I believe these are the wrong questions. Sure, they may be central to the idea of theodicy, and I also believe they are instinctual in nature. After all, if we can answer those questions, then maybe we can figure it out — and thereby stop the pattern of loss. If we can find the answer, then maybe it won’t be senseless anymore, and maybe we can even start to heal. We want the world to make sense. We want to believe that we are rewarded for being good, and we want the world to be fair.
But what if it isn’t fair?
We all want to find meaning, but in the times of major loss that I’ve experienced over the years, I believe a major key to my resilience has been to give up the idea that I can make sense of the senseless. Instead of asking God why this was happening, I started asking myself what kind of meaning could I create in the midst of all that suffering. The thought that kept me going was:
“I’ve already paid the price, so I might as well get everything I can out of it.”
All my life I’d believed that God made everything happen, or, when I left organized religion the first time, that I’d somehow “attracted” or “co-created” or “manifested” everything in my life. I had been surrounded by messages that “everything happens for a reason” or that “there are no accidents.” When I look back on it, I can see that nearly all of that put me at the center of the universe, where all of my decisions, faith, morals, actions, behaviors, desires, and other choices made up a matrix of consequences, each one like a divine equation that culminated in either punishment or reward. Whether it was Christian “blessing,” divine “correction,” or new age “manifestation,” it all came back to me and my worthiness.
And that kept me a slave to ideas of earning my right to happiness, of being lovable, of being good enough.
Early on in that cycle of loss, though, I came to that idea that I’d already paid the price, so I might as well mine it for everything it’s worth. Somehow that switched everything for me. No longer did I have to scry meaning from some inscrutable cosmic plan — I could decide what I wanted to get out of each loss. In that way, every loss became an opportunity rather than simply a heartbreak. As long as I could figure out a way to learn from it, grow from it, or pivot to some kind of benefit, then nothing could ever be a total loss. I devoted myself to searching for the treasure even in the darkest caves of my experience — not as a way to necessarily understand the loss and why it happened, but rather by accepting the loss for what it was and then seeing what I could learn or gain from it.
I also gave up the idea that “everything happens for a reason.”
Well, maybe not entirely. I’ve now come to understand that there are reasons. Randomness in the universe is a reason. The consequences of other people is a reason. My subconscious, with all its programs and beliefs, is another reason. When and where I was born, the traffic conditions, the types of people I’m attracted to, the stuff I’ve watched and read and listened to, the environment I grew up in, and even mysterious forces that we haven’t yet figured out how to measure might be reasons for anything that happens in my life.
I once attended a lecture where the researcher presented evidence that random number generators tend to synchronize during huge events, like the September 11th attacks or the 2004 tsunami. The lecturer then went on to show strange correlations during large solar flares. For example, psychiatric admissions increased at hospitals, road rage levels spiked, and even door-to-door visits by Jehovah’s Witnesses increased with solar flare occurrences. The point of her lecture was that we really don’t know why so many things happen, and that for all we know, the very concept of free will might be tied to things like solar flares and other cosmic patterns.
As I’ve been meditating on all of this, I remembered the old bumper stickers that were everywhere in the 90s:
Shit happens.
I don’t know if this was an international trend, but in the US, that message was everywhere. It was considered crass and cynical at the time, and it eventually even wound up in Forrest Gump. In the film, Forrest, played by Tom Hanks (in an Oscar-winning role), is a neurodivergent and disabled man whose mother encourages him to lived beyond the limits of his disabilities and low IQ. In one famous scene, he starts a cross-country running trek simply because he “felt like running,” and he becomes famous for his commitment. Eventually, he develops followers who believe that there must be something more to his arbitrary decision to start running, and along the way he meets a bumper sticker salesman who asks for help coming up with a catchy slogan.
While running, Forrest steps in a pile of dog feces and the salesman breathlessly exclaims, “Whoa man, you just ran through a big pile of dog shit!” Forrest calmly says, “It happens,” which sparks the slogan the salesman wanted. Cue a cutaway scene of the “shit happens” bumper sticker on the back of a pickup truck, as Forrest explains in a voiceover that the guy “made a lotta money off of it.”
As ridiculous as that is, there is actually a lot of wisdom there. Shit happens. And it happens to all of us, regardless of our thoughts and beliefs, no matter how good we are, regardless of our privilege or class or ethnicity or anything else. No matter who we are or how well we live, shit happens. And that’s just true. Period.
I used to read the book of Job, where God lets Satan torture his most loyal and righteous follower, and I saw lessons on faith, on patience, on positivity — and on blame. At one point in the story, Job says, “What I feared has come upon me.” I used to believe that this was the key to unlocking the entire story — that Job may have been faithful, but he was also full of fear, and so that fear opened a door to evil in his life.
Sound familiar? This is the same message in the “Word Faith movement,” the “Law of attraction” and other similar beliefs: If you believe purely enough, you will be blessed and enjoy peace, but any little shred of doubt, fear, or “resistance” opens the door to calamity.
When I think about it now, I can’t help but bristle at the idea that I am fully responsible for everything that happens to me, either by a failure of faith or because I somehow attracted it. How did my neighbor attract that dust devil that killed him in a freak accident? How did an entire generation of Holocaust victims attract Hitler? How does my friend, the Buddhist priest, deserve everything he’s going through right now when his entire life is devoted to mindfulness and peace?
I truly believe that there are forces at play that we can’t measure, like I mentioned above, but I also believe that part of life is driven by randomness. And at the end of the day, whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t really matter. I can live in the mystery, and I can hold the dynamic tension of believing in a higher power while also acknowledging what appears to be a largely random universe. I don’t have to choose between the two extremes of perfect order or chaos.
Instead, I can embrace all that life has to offer, and when shit happens, I may never know why it happened, but I can figure out what to do with it. I’ve already paid the price, so I might as well get everything I can out of it.
And that is liberating.
As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”
We may be at the mercies of forces we absolutely cannot control, and we may live in an utterly random universe full of chaos, every one of us destined to suffer death, injury, and loss, but we also each have the capacity to transform this chaos and loss into something meaningful — if we create that meaning for ourselves.
In Frankl’s words, “Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death…Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be…We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”
That is a type of alchemy that I believe we can all learn. It may be impossible to make sense of the senseless, but we can make meaning of our circumstances!
Contrast that to the words of Esther Hicks, proponent of the Law of Attraction, who responded to a question about how six million Jews attracted the despair and suffering they endured in the Holocaust:
"So it's a big question, how do large numbers of people have catastrophic simultaneous experiences ? And we say, we don't understand how you cannot understand that. When you hang around with one another and you talk about things in the way that you do, and you talk about victimhood, and you talk about injustice and you beat the drum of unfairness, how can anything other than someone to fulfill that vibrational escrow happen? In other words, millions of people were beating those kinds of drums. We have to say to you, that for everyone that died in that way, there were many, many, many more that didn't. in other words, it didn't happen to everyone. So why didn't it happen to everyone? Because there were vibrational differences among them…Everyone who lives anything is a vibrational match to what they're living." (Fort Collins, June 18, 2005)
In other words, they brought it on themselves.
In one of my Everyday Divina practices this week I listened to a podcast with marine biologist and policy expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She talked about her life-changing epiphany that came from working in Barbuda, a small Caribbean island.
The people there were doing everything right. They had cleaned up their water, saved their local tropical fish with preserves, and they basically made an entire cluster of policies to restore and preserve their ecosystem. Through a lot of effort and expense, the entire community became a model for sustainability. And then hurricane Irma came with devastating power and nearly wiped them out.
The storm had been supercharged by climate change, caused by how the rest of the world lived. In this way, the citizens of Barbuda really were victims. And we are going to see a lot more of this as developing coastal and island nations suffer the most from climate injustice. Is it fair? Absolutely not. Do they deserve it? No. Is God punishing them? I seriously doubt it. Did they attract all of this somehow? Oh please.
But do they still have agency? Yes. And can they find meaning in this new age of superstorms? That’s exactly what they are doing. The people there reached out for help, continued to pursue ecological balance, and they rebuilt, knowing that more storms will almost certainly come. It isn’t fair and their ability to rebuild doesn’t take from the fact that it was devastating and painful. But they have chosen, as a community, to adapt, to live, to continue, and to make the best of it.
They are learning — and they are teaching. They are using their experience to persuade others to change things as well, and they are choosing to courageously live their own values even as they leave behind some of the things they used to cling to. Instead of seeing themselves as only victims, unable to do anything about their situation, they looked at their options, made decisions, and decided to live in the way that best helps them thrive in this new world.
In other words, they’ve created meaning.
We almost always have choices. Sometimes it looks like a double bind of two terrible choices, but if we really step back and look at the infinite number of things we can do, then maybe we’ll see other options, or we will at least feel better about the fact that we do, actually have some agency. Then we can make the best choice rather than only being a victim to some external system — even when we are actually victims to some external system! It feels so emotionally different to own the idea that “I chose this” rather than “they’re doing this to me.”
If anyone was ever a victim, it was Viktor Frankl. The accounts of his losses and suffering during the Holocaust are horrific, and yet he persisted, surrendering to hope and meaning rather than death and victimhood. He wrote that the greatest pain and suffering are not physical, but “the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.” He said that the people who focused on the current injustice and the losses of the past perished, while the people who kept hoping for a future were able to survive even when they looked like walking skeletons.
This hope, he said, this vision for the future, was life itself. Like Nietzsche, Frankl believed that we who have a “why” to live for can bear almost any “how.”
And that was how I made it through two years of constant loss. Turning every circumstance into an opportunity became my “why.” I didn’t have to figure out why things were happening to me. No, rather I decided to look for whatever gift I could in every challenge, in every loss, in every setback. I looked for whatever choices I could make, even if that was just to get up, take a shower, and eat, and I decided to trust that I would make it through. I had no idea how I would, I had no idea when this would all stop, and I didn’t know if there was some cosmic reason all of this was happening, whether that be God, the devil, a curse, the Law of Attraction, or Saturn return (all of which were suggested by my friends). I didn’t need to know any “why” except the one I chose to focus on:
If I’ve already paid the price, I might as well get everything I can out of this.
Shit happens. And sometimes a lot of it. But that doesn’t mean I have to wear it. And maybe, if I change the way I think about it, I can use that shit for fertilizer.
Or, as Viktor Frankl wrote more eloquently:
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life…to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Being responsible isn’t the same as being at fault. Whatever we might be going through, I seriously doubt we are solely to blame. I refuse to believe that I somehow attracted or deserved some of the things that have happened to me any more than Viktor Frankl deserved to be brutalized in concentration camps or my neighbor getting killed in a freak paragliding accident. But I am responsible for how I respond to it — and at the end of the day, therein lies hope, therein lies power, and therein lies the resilience to transform life’s struggle into meaning.
Hansel and Gretel / Anne and Viktor
This beautiful,
Terrible,
Everyday life
Holds within its berth
All the joy
And tragedy
Of dawn and midnight
Of gain and loss,
Of love and despair,
Of refuge and genocide,
Of promiscuous compassion,
And the unfathomable cruelty
We cast like nets
Over the world's last doves.
A canon of fairy tales
Only glimpses
The tangle of briars and roses
In every person's
Every day.
And still the grass grows.
Buds push through snow.
And ants crawl in their dark labyrinths.
Not caring —
Or even knowing —
The stories we spin
To give meaning
To our unique
Prolific
Pedestrian experiences.
The story of humanity
Is told
In Black Forest evildoers
With their child-roasting ovens,
Cunning wolves
And ravenous kings,
Deadly and forbidden apples
Provided by parents,
And narrow escapes,
Told again and again
Throughout the ages.
The bough breaks.
The cradle falls.
And we wonder
At a violent world
That makes sense
To every creature
But man.
I love you,
Eric