#17: Mystery is my religion.

We can’t escape chaos. But we can reframe it.

Hello to our new subscribers! There are a fair number of you this week, which has Leona (my editor) and I as pleased as punch. And you arrived at a great time! This post has taken us literally weeks… And it’s been so worth it. When I finally committed to creating The Luminist, this was one of the topics I was most excited to tackle!

Please don’t hesitate to add your own two cents in the “your turn” section at the bottom. The Luminist would be nothing if it were only the thoughts in my own head. Everything you add makes our conversation richer, more authentic, and more powerful.

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Confronting chaos.

Many times when we lose a loved one, there is a “reason.” A cause followed by an effect.

Old age. Chronic illness. A steady decline. Something that “makes sense.” Something that — through the grief and loss — keeps our worldview intact: things are predictable, they happen for a logical reason, with enough foresight we can prepare for the worst and even slow our trajectory towards it.

Mike’s death had none of these hallmarks.

He was slim and trim, disciplined to the extreme, and explicitly driven to live a long, robust life after watching his mother die of breast cancer when he was 22. Mike did all the right things.

He could turn down a chocolate chip cookie when the rest of us were gorging on a freshly-baked batch. His on-the-road, room-service meals were salmon, kale, and blueberries on repeat. After a physical exam six short months before his death, the doctor reported, “No sign of cardiovascular disease.”

Then he died of a widow-maker heart attack.

Worldview shattered.

First when the ER doc told me they had done everything they could… and again when I received the autopsy report. After that, there were no pieces of said worldview to put back together. It was all just fine powder flying through the air.

But less victorious… (Courtesy The Lakers.)

Life relieved of logic.

Chaos ensued. I became apathetic, apoplectic, nihilistic, and soon turned to worshiping Satan… KIDDING.

But seriously, isn’t this what we subconsciously suspect is around the corner for anyone who loses touch with the logic and order, the cause and effect of reality? That or they become a dead weight on society, requiring family and friends to take care of them, unable or unwilling to cope with the day-to-day tasks of living? 

In contrast, six months after Mike died I had just started a new job, regularly astonished people by how “well” I seemed to be doing, and was writing these words to the pastor that had married Mike and I 18 years before:

“His death is inexplicable in any logical sense, but I very much feel this is part of the mystery of life. I believe there are just things our human brains cannot comprehend in this world. His death at 50 is one of these. But in the six months that have passed, I can say I revere this mystery. I don’t want or need to understand everything about our lives on this earth. I am comfortable with not knowing.”

Even now, I am astonished I was able to write these words so soon after. But I was living in a brand new world, one where mystery reigned… quite literally.

The six months after Mike’s death were filled with more serendipity and mind-boggling coincidences than the 48 years before combined:

• A song from our courtship — not in my phone’s music library — came on shuffle just as I was falling into deep despair that Mike, and the love we had shared, had vanished into the ether.

• A friend randomly sent me a video created less than three months after Mike died of the same pastor telling a story from our premarital counseling though the pastor had no knowledge of Mike’s passing (sparking the letter quoted above).

• Discovering a forgotten letter Mike had written a decade before, spelling out exactly how he would want Connor, Kendall, and I to live our lives if he were to suddenly die — “know this love, and move forward with your lives, living them fully and happily.”

Ummm…WTF??

And those are just the big ones. Rarely did a day go by in those six months that I wasn’t blown away by some synchronicity. 

Turns out the opposite of control is not chaos — nor failure nor despair nor flying off the handle. It’s mystery. It’s wonder and curiosity and child-like awe.

It’s magic. 

Yep, this type-A MBA, defense-contractor executive, trusted leader of thousands just said that… with a smile and a wink ;).

This is a plot twist in my life to be sure. If someone had told me that one day I’d be writing such a sentence, I would have been too stunned to speak in anything more than single syllables. “Huh? What? Why?? No.” The thought of control waning and chaos reigning would have triggered an imaginary spiral in my mind that led straight to Satan worship or at least whack-a-doodle crazy. 

So I spent 48 years fighting it… until I was all alone reading an autopsy report. It’s weird to say — it’ll always be weird to say — but once again I’m feeling massive gratitude for the gifts of Mike’s death.

Because with my worldview pulverized to dust I was able to choose a new way to see reality. 

A way that celebrates the mystery. 

A way that embraces life’s unpredictability as a feature rather than a bug. 

A way that makes space for unbelievable coincidences and synchronicities and “miracles”… alongside unbelievable tragedies.

(Courtesy Dallas Buyers Club.)

The only thing we can control.

At first my grief-addled brain accepted mystery, welcomed mystery, rolled in mystery like a pig in mud. And then my powers of reason started to trickle back in… Had I gone mad? Was I just tricking myself? Was I seeking a way to bypass Mike’s death? Was this way of thinking putting my or my children’s future in jeopardy?

Rationality cut like a knife through my hard-earned openness to things unbelievable. To things that made me feel like a kid again, filled with wonder and amazement, and above all, peace.

This would not do.

I wasn’t going back. I would find the middle ground. Who decided that to be a responsible adult you also had to be deeply pessimistic? (Or call it “realistic.”)

So I sharpened my blade and then turned my rationality on itself:

Let’s be real, Sue, there is ONE thing in this world you can control — and you’re going to control the hell out of it: the way you react to the chaos around you.

I didn’t have to use my mind as a knife — splitting, sorting, judging, figuring out “how” and “why” — all the time. Because that reaction means that the thing in front of me, whatever it may be, is a problem to be dissected, sliced, and solved… rather than a wonder to be marveled at. Sure, I can and will whip out my rationality knife when formulating plans B, C, and D to safeguard my family’s future. But if the knife is over-applied, life can’t help but become a series of struggles.

(I think I just discovered why Sherlock Holmes never seems to be the happiest chap.)

(Courtesy Sherlock.)

In other words, I don’t know if synchronicities are “real.” And I don’t really care. It’s all part of the mystery… Please, no spoilers! I am giving myself permission to notice the weird coincidences and cherish them, maybe even call them miracles, without the burden of searching for causation.

Because they wouldn’t be any less magical if I knew how they worked. I’d just be less appreciative of their magic, less touched by it, less delighted by it. I’d explain it away. I wouldn’t let it make me feel something. And I want to feel something.

(FYI, causation is still very much a part of my daily life. Just only when it’s actually constructive, rather than simply a wet blanket.)

So here I am, six years later. I don’t have faith in some specific thing — God, Spirit, the universe, the Force, the Rings of Power. Rather, I believe — and have come to love — that I have no clue who or what is running the show. I accept that I’ll never know. I never want to know. And I definitely never want to be the one in full control.

Please do NOT put me in control of this show (courtesy Cirque du Soleil.)

Which is how mystery became my religion… and philosophy and strategy and daily vitamin.

(Side note: I’m beginning to think the real issue is that we’ve framed magic and reality as opposites… Reality is actually quite magical when we’re not insisting that we’re so unimpressed by it.)

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If you don’t want to call it magic or mystery, if you want to stick with coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity (cue the 1983 Police album with Sting belting out the words), that’s great too! 

Call it a banana for all I care. But give it a word.

Because naming it is noticing it. And noticing it is accepting it as part of your world. Without trying to minimize it, explain it, insist that you’re unimpressed by it.

In conclusion.

We live in a universe so vast and complicated and unmeasurable and unknown that it’s seemingly governed by five types of physics that the smartest people on the planet are still struggling to reconcile… Yours truly definitely has no idea what’s going on.

Once upon a time, I reacted to this cluelessness with control and cynicism.

Now I embrace it, arms wide, looking for anything I can find that makes absolutely no sense. Through this new view, the universe shivers, tingles, shimmies with magic. The same one that felt dark and inhospitable before…

Turns out we have a massive amount of control — control over whether our lives feel thrillingly unbelievable or merely unpredictable. Which are basically the same thing, but with one major difference.

In amazement,

Sue

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Your turn!

What is something in your life that has felt unexplainable? Timely and unlikely and undeniable.

• A song that speaks to exactly what you’re feeling starts playing on the radio.

• You randomly run into a long-lost friend or lover and end up reconnecting. (Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck!)

• An acquaintance reaches out with a potential job right when you start thinking it’s time for a change.

• You have a dream that predicts a news story the following week.

• Your mom, spouse, sibling gets a feeling something is “off,” acts on it, and saves themselves/another from a tragedy.

As an example…

You meet your beloved collaborator and editor Leona, with whom you have co-birthed a weekly mini-manifesto on loss and vibrant living, after your paths intersect for a brief few hours on a Colorado mountainside.

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Keep reading…

#12: How I became a heart-seeking missile (in a good way).

#6: The radiance in dailiness.

#2: Why I wouldn't trade away the grief.

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