I personally love when people have tattoos that don’t “mean anything.” When they just got them because they liked how they looked. I find it so cool and confident. Meanwhile, you can catch me weaving some long narrative every time I get asked why I have a lemon tattooed on my arm. But, the fact that this is one of the most frequently asked questions of people with tattoos is always so funny to me. Why are we so desperate to ascribe meaning to everything?
I’ve always been a everything happens for a reason kinda girl. I remember my dad telling me something one day that really stuck with me, mostly because I’m a sucker for a visual.
He said that life is like a giant, woven tapestry, but you can only see the back of it. Maybe you make out some shapes, maybe some colors. Some of it might actually look clear as day, and other parts could be a complete mystery. You just have to trust that one day, you’ll see the front of it, the picture will come together, and everything will make sense.
I was pretty young when I heard this for the first time (maybe 9 or 10?), so it sounded pretty fine and dandy to me. After all, 9 years on earth is still pretty fresh. Most kids aren’t super jaded yet. Of course, things would make sense later! But, the older I’ve gotten, the more my views on this have changed. I look at this idea with a kind of sweet sadness; I think it’s a really lovely way to view the world, but it just doesn’t hold up for me.
Life is divided into things that happen to you and things that you choose to do. The “things that happen to you” category is usually where people get all everything happens for a reason on ya. But what about the things you do? Actually, a lot of the stuff I do has no reasoning at all. So, why would it make sense later? Are you tracking?
See, I think the subtext of not understanding why something is happening to you is that we sort of believe that even if you might not understand, the reason still exists out there somewhere. And by some miracle, in the future, I’ll eventually be privy to that information. Maybe not now, but someone will someday say “The joke is up! Here’s why you went through all that.”
I don’t know about you, but many of my life events haven’t been neatly tied up with a bow, and I don’t think that they all will, either.
And, you know what? I’m actually okay with that. I think that sometimes we are so desperate to find the deeper meaning behind some wild thing that happened to us that we forget to live in the moments we’re actually experiencing right then and there.
The future is not promised to me, and neither is that “one day” where it’s all supposed to make sense. Instead of making that some kind of depressing mantra I write in my affirmations journal every morning, I actually do my best to let it empower me to live in the present. As far as I know, I have this moment in time, this air in my lungs, these people around me, and this set of lessons I’ve picked up along the way. Oh, and a lemon on my arm. And that’s enough.
Anyway, I hope this newsletter was okay! No worries if not! Talk soon! Bye!