#117: What can’t be explained.
A logic devotee's unexpected journey into mystery (and why Einstein would approve).
The Luminist is a reader-supported publication that illuminates the pain, the pleasure, and the paradox on the path to technicolor living. Subscribe below to receive posts about how loss teaches us to get the most out of life (along with silly gifs) in your inbox every Saturday.
Let’s get one thing straight: I'm a deeply rational person.
I can explain NATO's command structure, quote Fairfax County's baffling building codes, and navigate insurance claims with surgical precision. I actually read instruction manuals. The whole way through. From a young age, I learned logic was the best security blanket — follow the rules, connect the dots, and life works out fine.
Then my kale-eating, never-skipping-a-workout, in-“perfect”-health (the doc said so) husband died of a heart attack, without warning or explanation…
When my battered brain came back online months later, I looked at the splintered shards of my best laid plans and thought:
This is not how life is supposed to work.
My conversion from a strict “it’s logical or it’s bullshit” mindset to what you could call “mystery curious” was slow and subtle. But looking back it seems inevitable. The unexplainable first smashed my life into smithereens, and then wouldn’t leave me alone.
Songs Mike used to sing at the top of his lungs randomly appeared in my music library, though I have no recollection of adding them. (Love's Divine by Seal suddenly was on my hiking playlist??) His pet name for me ("Sweet Pea") caught my eye on a shampoo bottle of all places as I was shopping for our first three-person family trip. Cardinals showed up outside my office window on the darkest days, giving me a cocked-head stare-down until I finally met their gaze.
I didn’t have a full-on conversion to woo woo, but in the years since Mike died, I’ve dabbled… heavily. Name a way to connect with the mysterious, and I've probably tried it — reiki, psychics, tarot readings. Usually while trying not to roll my eyes at myself.
Because I never abandoned logic entirely — you still need rational thinking to hold down a corporate job and keep teenagers alive. But I stopped expecting life to make sense all the time. The more I opened to mystery, the more it showed up everywhere.
Which brings me to Sedona.
My friend Nancy has a knack for finding boutique retreats, and I have a knack for saying “yes” to her invites to join. (To be fair, offering me an opportunity to leave Virginia in January is not a hard sell.)
Sedona is like the Las Vegas of spiritual seeking — except what happens in the vortex gets posted about on Instagram. Actually, I guess that’s just like Las Vegas. Anyway, we weren’t going for the woo. We were going to hike through the terracota canyons, swim under the warm sun (bless you, Arizona), and forget it was winter for a minute. But when my spa treatment just happened to include a tarot reading, I wasn’t surprised or mad about it.
In case you haven’t dipped your toe in tarot yet, the general idea is that you ask the cards a question. Then your tarot reader lays out a “spread” of cards that is meant to explain the context of your question and clarify a way forward. So there’s a card that describes the current situation, a card that describes the biggest obstacle, a card that describes how to overcome it, a card that describes the gift in the situation, etc.
But for once in my overthinking life, I arrived without a burning question. I’ll admit I was a little smug watching the cards be laid out — as if they needed me more than I needed them.
At least that's what I thought until Cara, my reader, saw right through me.
"I sense fear in you," she said, laying down another card.
I almost laughed. Fear? I've stood in an emergency room while my world collapsed. I've rebuilt a life from scratch. I've raised teenagers alone. Fear and I are old drinking buddies, but we haven’t been hanging out much recently.
Yet the cards kept coming. Be your big, bold self (peacock!). Speak the dark truths others won't (moon!).
Then it hit me like a spiritual two-by-four — I'm not afraid of the darkness. I'm afraid of bringing too much light.
The truth is I often feel fear tickling the back of my brainstem as I’m tiptapping these posts out to you, dear reader. I’m constantly worried that my message about transformation after loss will feel like mockery or empty promises to someone still trapped in the shadowland of grief. So I hedge, almost without realizing I’m doing it. It doesn’t feel like giving into fear, it feels like making the rational decision given my mission and my audience.
But Cara and the cards were having none of it. “No pulling punches, no watering down the message. Yes, people will throw rocks. Too bad. Do your job."
Literally the weekend I published a post about bold encouragement, I’m getting called out by tarot cards for not taking my own advice.
Then the cards (the guides? the universe?) reached across the divide into my corporate comfort zone: "Your business experience? That's what makes you different. All that practice there will help you amplify your message as a writer and teacher. You got this."
Checkmate.
Woo woo brought me an answer I hadn’t realized I needed.
Maybe that's all spiritual seeking really is — finding new perspectives to reveal hidden truths. Or maybe the universe can read my five-dimensional aura soul frequency. (If so, I hope it's a cool color.)
In other words, for me the mechanism of insight doesn’t really matter. We don't understand how love works, how the placebo effect can change our physiology, or why toddlers have a sixth sense for when you're trying to use the bathroom in peace. Yet we experience these things and trust these experiences anyway.
Even Einstein — the poster genius for rational thinking — said:
”I believe in mystery and, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man.”
If the guy who cracked the physics code could embrace mystery, maybe the rest of us can stop demanding explanations for everything that moves us.
You know what else exists thanks to mystery? This newsletter.
The last adventure Nancy proposed was Telluride, where a random hiking trail connected me with an easy-smiling brunette who turned out to be the writing partner I didn't know I needed. Now
and I spend our Saturdays challenging the cultural expectations about life after loss, one Substack at a time.Looking back at these honestly absurd eight years since Mike died, I can’t help but believe that sometimes the most rational choice is letting go of rationality. Sometimes the answer comes not through deductive reasoning, but a tarot reading in Sedona, a cardinal's stare-down, a shampoo bottle.
We don't have to understand the delivery system. We just have to be willing to receive the message.
Antenna up,
