Clues
Here is a proposal for a radically different way of understanding the developments, happenings, and outcomes that feature into each and any of our lives. Namely: See these events as information. In a sense, see them as clues.
The reason this is radical is because viewing what comes as information is qualitatively different from the way we often view these events. We tend to view what comes to us through the lens of success and failure; or good fortune versus bad fortune; or gain versus loss. All those continua make life into a tragedy rather than a discovery.
A little seed started the course of my thinking about this. A man spoke to his relative about something missing from his life. The specifics of the situation do not matter here, but I know the relative, and through this person I learned a bit about the exchange. The response this person gave to the man was: Maybe you are not meant to have that thing.
Such a response is, of course, not satisfying. It does nothing to soothe or solve how the hearer might feel about what is missing. But what this response does manage is (potentially) to move the evaluation to a different place, and possibly reframe how it feels to have this feeling.
In short, the lack that is felt does not have to be a deficit. It might be data instead.
Ashamed of Wanting
We all want things. Many of our wants go unsatisfied even within a full life. And we do feel this; the feelings arising from our awareness of what is missing range from yen to yearning, from pining to real pain.
But then, at the presence of this feeling, must we also add shame? Because this is precisely what we are apt to do. In addition to wanting and not having, there is a tendency to give ourselves an additional pain that says, “I failed,” or “I am incomplete,” or “I have lost.”
Maybe you are not meant to have that thing. Maybe I am not meant to have that thing. Maybe we are meant to have something else.
Meaning: Maybe you are meant for something else that is coming, or maybe you ought to look for the solution or the next step in a very different place than where you have been willing to look so far.
Again, there is no answer in this to the pain arising from the wanting itself. Framing the matter this way simply opens a corridor to the insight or intel the pain might be pointing to, or perhaps even the hope the pain might contain.
Thinking in terms like this—what we are meant to have and how to discover it—is, to one extent, an abrogation of the self’s wants. We become analytical where the wanting wants us to feel.
But at the same time, responding this way is a validation of the self. Addressing the wanting in these terms recognizes the primacy of individual experience and destiny. Each of us is made different not just in our bodies and in our minds, but also in our stories. Each of us has a unique and different life, with separate burdens to carry, and each of us is feeling his or her way toward a destiny different from anyone else’s. We know all this. And yet we don’t know it—we need the reminder all the time.
Good and Evil Relative to Me
An angel presumably would not have this problem. Angels have wants, apparently, because we are told the wants of some of them led to their fall. But the unfallen angels, by nature of what they see and know, must be more fully aware than we are of being creatures of God’s cosmos, and instruments of God’s service. And it must be that they therefore proceed without condemning themselves or their fates if something they want is not obtained, or if they are not able to produce a good outcome desired.
The devils fume and rage. But it must be the angels do not—nor do they burst with feeling when something wished for happens. Knowing God is in control, the angel’s reaction to events is unflappable, perhaps with a rationality more like that of an AI.
Meanwhile, we humans are frequently not like that. We are prone to be distraught, anxious, and self-condemning about what comes. And the reason for this goes deep; one can see our confusion about events and the nature of their origins getting started in the early pages of the Bible. Per the Bible’s story of the first spiritually aware people, the power that this man and woman took, the forbidden fruit of which they ate, was the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). In short, these humans partook of this divine knowledge without any divine perspective with which to make sense of it. The only perspective they had was the view through their own eyes and mind. Therefore, the knowledge of good and evil became something attenuated and narrow: the knowledge of good and evil merely relative to me.
Navigating the world through the lens of this limited view is a curse.
Welcome to the human experience.
Life as Communication
We can’t shake that curse. I will still rage over what I presume I am entitled to. But for those of a spirit at least sometimes willing to humbly seek, this reminder is a touchstone: Your life is a story, and the accurate perspective on that story comes from a vantage bigger than the one your life provides.
Meanwhile, to view the events of life as information is to discover just how much information there is, and how near is the information provider.
These different ways of framing the happenings of life—seeing them as clues rather than scoring them as good and bad—ultimately come down to differences in attention: revering and looking to God rather than revering and looking to other people. If I am stuck in judgement over what my own self seemingly ought to have or seemingly ought to experience, then I am looking to the relative experiences of other selves to construct the basis of this judgement.
But if the life all around me is a sphere of experience providing information, providing clues and direction about the unique way my own life might go, then in effect I am seeking to pay attention. I am even seeking to communicate. Because in acting upon the clues, I am giving my response to the One who is making that sphere.
Photo: “Bruce Nauman: Human/Need/Desire” by Ed Schipul
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