On magic, meaning-making and finding the light amidst the shadows

It's been hard to find the light to counter the darkness that seems to be shrouding the world these days. The doom and the dimness of sense has felt heavy. I even have a reminder tattooed on my arm to not get too laid low when things feel bleak. A tattoo based on the words of someone who lived through the worst of humanity themselves and still, found reason to rise. So I've been finding refuge from the storm in good people - and I've surrendered the strain of trying to make or talk sense about everything. Because that can be exhausting, and I'm tired of it. So this piece is one that I've been pondering for some time - and an invitation to resource ourselves in other more illuminating ways. Namely, by finding solace and sense in people who have wisdom and love to share that matters most.

Everything happens for a reason. How many times have you heard or maybe said these words, by way of seeking to explain the seemingly unexplainable? It’s a platitude that comes to mind and is often offered up as an attempt to make sense of loss, of grief, of dissatisfaction, when life doesn’t go our way or when life is taken away in what feels like a cruel twist of a fate we cannot control.

In the absence of control, we seek solace, impose meaning, assume that there must be some sense behind an occurrence which appears to have come cruelly out of nowhere. There has to be some reason, some causal factor, some design or plan, even if it is beyond our comprehension.

Is there any truth in the idea that everything happens for a reason? How can we ever know? Is it a lazy platitude, albeit a well-intentioned one (to soothe, pacify, comfort) or is it a desperate and survivalist attempt to explain away (bypass) some kind of pain lest we get caught in the mind’s cyclic attempt to impose order on chaos?

I, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, used to hate the phrase, feel frustrated by it. I’ve been thinking of it lately and how it actually says something about the truth of cause and consequence. Things do happen for a reason, reasons that relate to a chain of events set in motion about which we may not, with our unavoidably limited perspectives (limited by the course of our lives and that which we know – and hence that which we don’t), understand.

“Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.” Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

In Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, Haruki #1, the kamikaze sky solider whose legacy is immortalised in the letters his mother secreted away and which the main character, his niece, becomes engrossed in long after his death, is pained by the non-choice he has to make as time leads him towards the moment when he must simultaneously kill and die. He thinks of his options; to sabotage the task and die alone, or take his so-called enemies with him, so-called because he does not wish to hate or harm.

In his mind, he runs through the consequences of each scenario, contemplating the long line of people and potential events that will follow in the wake of whatever course of action he takes. The possibilities would be paralysing were it not for the fact that his life is in a momentum beyond his control, his fate is practically sealed, and yet human consciousness, hope and fear, leads him to wonder – now what?

At another point in the book, Haruki #1 reflects on the death of his friend K, for which he feels responsible, because K had learned to bear the pain he endured while detained as a Prisoner of War, with perfect equanimity. It was when Haruki #1 stepped in to take K's beating that K was visibly distraught, after which, K could take it no more seeing how Haruki #1 and the others were being treated. K ran, and was killed:

"It still torments me to imagine that I was the one responsible for his death, but in this tangled world of cause and effect, it is impossible to know,"

writes Haruki #1 in his secret letters to his mother Jiko, wrangling with the unknown yet certain fact that every volitional act he takes, we all take, represents the outward manifestation of human will and so is, whether by a moment or a millimetre, a cause of whatever follows.

The Zen philosopher Dogen, as Ozeki references in the book, says that each moment is equivalent to 65,000 hand claps – claps that we may not have made ourselves but have been made by the hands of others and lead us to find ourselves in the here and now. Now is all that we can be sure of, that is real, that is available to make sense of. Everything else is just reconstruction, fabrication, conceptual analysis and imagination. In the Buddha Dharma, that’s all pretty much pointless (where pointlessness is liberation from the strain of trying to control everything, and the mind’s effort to narrate every moment).

Look up

Lately I’ve been seeing stars. In the pages of nearly every book I’ve dipped into or read at length, in the utterances of characters in films and news, and of course, in the skies and on my arm, having tattooed the words of an uncle who seemed to know things about me before I did, and at least before I ever knew or vocalised them myself.

How did he know - I’ve often bent my mind wondering - what I needed to hear but couldn’t at the time truly face, but which later would save my sanity? Because he’d been in the same state of darkness, because there’s a thread that connects the way some in my family experience the world, because given the experiences we’ve run into and run away from, and given our epigenetics, it – I, he – was always going to end up with parts of us the way they are.

I’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter. The moment, the words, are no less meaningful without a definitive reason. The greatest wisdom often points to something mysterious, something beyond concept, to the moon that we shouldn’t mistake for the finger pointing to it, to use another Zen analogy.

It’s concepts that get in the way, education you might say, the Western model (ironically called The Enlightenment and far removed from the Eastern notion of waking up to a reality beyond the human-centred descriptors of such, which as we now know, and as a result – cause and consequence – have led us and the world to the messy state we’re in, but I digress) that wants to know everything, to label it, explain it, categorise and impose a perspective.

My uncle’s death came as a shock, as death always does, even when the events leading up to it were all pointing in that direction. The direction is inevitable for us all but when it comes before it feels fair, it hurts all the more. I’ve spent much of the time since trying to understand him in his absence, while similarly being glad for the words he left me that point to the pointlessness of that effort, and surrender to the fact that where there is light, there is shadow, and where there is shadow, there is light.

I was reminded of this when I happened upon a letter in the book Letters of Note, compiled by Shaun Usher.

Following James Dean’s death in 1955, friend and screenwriter of ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, Stewart Stern sent a letter of condolence to Dean’s aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, describing Dean as a star who “burned an unforgettable mark in the history of his art”, noting that Dean touched his life and opened his eyes in ways that will move him ways that made Stern appreciate “the value of a minute”:

“A star goes wild in the places beyond air – a dark star born of coldness and invisible. It hits the upper edges of our atmosphere and look! It is seen! It flames and arcs and dazzles. It goes out in ash and memory. But its after-image remains in our eyes to be looked at again and again. For it was rare. And it was beautiful. And we thank God and nature for sending it in front of our eyes.

“So few things blaze. So little is beautiful. Our world doesn’t seem equipped to contain its brilliance too long. Ecstasy is only recognizable when one has experienced pain. Beauty only exists when set against ugliness. Peace is not appreciated without war ahead of it. How we wish that life could support only the good. But it vanishes when its opposite no longer exists as a setting. It is a white marble on unmalting snow. And Jimmy stands clear and unique in a world where much is synthetic and dishonest and drab. He came and rearranged our molecules.”