The Need to Make It Mean Something

There are certain phrases people reach for when someone is grieving.

Everything happens for a reason.

It's often followed by the idea that it's all part of some larger plan. That someday you'll understand why this had to happen. I know people mean it kindly. They're trying to make something unbearable feel a little less random, and I appreciate the compassion behind that.

There was a lesson you needed to learn.

That one has always been the hardest for me. No one should have to learn a lesson that way. It has always felt a little dismissive, as though the pain somehow needed to be justified by what came afterward. I've never been comfortable with that way of looking at it.

Not because I think life is meaningless. I don't.

I think we sometimes become so uncomfortable with uncertainty that we start assigning every experience a job. If something hurts, it must have taught us something. If something wonderful happens, it must have happened for a reason. We want everything to justify the space it occupies in our lives. I'm not convinced it has to.

I've carried those boxes before, especially after profound loss. There's a certain safety in holding tightly to things for a while, and I think there can be healing there too. But healing also includes letting go. Eventually you realize the value wasn't in the trinket itself. The value was in the afternoon it reminded you of, the person you were with, the museum you wandered through, the little restaurant you found by accident, or the record store where you spent an hour happily flipping through albums you'd never heard before. The object wasn't the experience. It was just the bookmark.

The same thing happens with ordinary pleasures. Reading a favorite book doesn't require a defense. A rainy afternoon doesn't have to symbolize peace. Wandering through a museum doesn't have to change my life. Sometimes a meal is just a really good meal, and sometimes an ordinary Saturday is memorable simply because it was pleasant.

People have always been judgmental. That's hardly new. We all seem to have opinions about the way everyone else should live, grieve, celebrate, parent, spend money, spend time, or find happiness. It's exhausting to watch because, underneath it all, most of us are quietly hoping everyone else will simply let us be ourselves.

Maybe that's why so many of us are looking for permission. Not permission to become someone else, but permission to enjoy what we enjoy, grieve the way we grieve, change our minds, or simply let an ordinary day be enough. Maybe even permission to be exactly who we already are. We're often unwilling to give that permission to anyone else or ourselves.

Perhaps permission is what leaves room for meaning to find us on its own.

Sometimes things just become deeply meaningful on their own.