When There Are No Answers

I saw a video today that put words around something I have come to believe very deeply about tragedy, loss, and the kind of pain that changes us.

And when I say tragedy, I don’t only mean the enormous, visible tragedies we usually associate with that word.

Tragedy can be death. A diagnosis. A natural disaster. The loss of a relationship, a livelihood, or a future you thought was yours. It can be betrayal that changes what you believed to be true, or an experience that leaves you wondering who you are now.

There are things that divide our lives into before and after.

Things so painful, disorienting, or incomprehensible that our minds desperately try to make sense of them.

Why did this happen?

How could this happen?

How do I fix it?

How do I make this stop hurting?

The man in the video said something that stopped me:

“The mind cannot deal with it. So you have to go deeper than the mind.”

Deeper than the mind.

Into love.

Faith.

Hope.

Meaning.

Purpose.

I believe this with every part of me.

When something devastating happens, we naturally want relief from it.

Some of us numb ourselves. We self-medicate. We stay impossibly busy. We distract ourselves with work, relationships, substances, achievement, or anything else that gives us some distance from what hurts.

Sometimes that may be how we survive when the pain is simply too much to hold all at once.

But there is a difference between finding temporary relief from pain and building a life around never having to feel it.

We can numb it, outrun it, bury it, or distract ourselves from it, but that doesn’t mean the pain is gone.

It is still there.

And eventually, if we want something more than survival, we have to find something capable of carrying us through what our minds cannot solve.

Because there are losses you cannot reason your way out of.

There are deaths you cannot make sense of.

There are betrayals for which no explanation will ever be enough.

There are things that cannot be repaired or returned to what they were before.

I know this because I have lived some of it.

And maybe you have too.

The mind wants an answer that will make everything make sense again.

Sometimes there isn’t one.

And sometimes we are too devastated to reach for anything at all.

Maybe that is what it means to go deeper than the mind.

Not to force ourselves to feel hopeful when we aren’t.

Not to manufacture meaning from something that feels meaningless.

Not to pretend our faith is unwavering when it isn’t.

But to understand that there are things within us, and beyond us, that exist even when our minds cannot access or explain them.

Love can still exist in the middle of unbearable pain.

Faith can coexist with fear, anger, doubt, and questions.

Hope does not require us to know what comes next. It can be the quiet possibility that this moment, no matter how consuming it feels, is not the entirety of our story.

Meaning does not require us to believe that what happened was supposed to happen. We can create meaning from how we choose to live afterward.

And purpose does not disappear simply because we have lost sight of it.

Our lives still matter.

There can still be something here for us to do, experience, create, give, become, or love.

What happened may have changed the course of our lives, but it did not erase the possibility of a meaningful future.

We may not know what that future looks like yet.

We may not even be able to imagine it.

But it can still be there.

And slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, we keep moving.

Sometimes courageously.

Sometimes angrily.

Sometimes with extraordinary strength.

Sometimes barely.

One day into the next.

I don’t believe tragedy is given to us to make us stronger.

I don’t believe every terrible thing happens for a reason.

And I don’t believe we have to be grateful for the things that nearly destroyed us.

But I do believe human beings are capable of building meaning from what remains.

I believe we can walk through fire without allowing the fire to have the final word about who we become.

And I believe that when the pain is bigger than anything our minds can understand, there are things deeper than understanding.

Love.

Faith.

Hope.

Meaning.

Purpose.

Hold onto them for dear life.

Sometimes they are the very things that carry us home.