How Can We Learn From The Mysteries Of Life, Even When The Mystery Sucks?
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After I die and God drops by my place in heaven for a cup of tea, I don’t think I’ll open our discussion with questions about why the rest of us had to be banished because Adam ate an apple or why decent people get knocked cosmically upside the head while perfectly monstrous facsimiles of humanity don’t.
Instead I’ll kick off my flip flops, shrug out of my wings (yes, this is a hopeful fantasy) and settle back in the sofa with this question: God, why can’t retailers get their sizing act together?
Why is it that one pair of shoes, size 6½, are a perfect fit, yet an almost identical pair — same brand, same style, same size — are way too tight?
This may not seem like much of a question worth bothering God with, but I am increasingly convinced that, au contraire, it is a question God welcomes. Like a bullfighter waving a red cape, He urges us forward. Not to skewer us, mind you, but to grab us by the horns and, in one thrust, pierce our hearts and bullheaded preconceptions.
What do preconceptions have to do with shoes arriving in the wrong size?
Merriam-Webster defines a preconception as an idea or opinion that someone has before learning about or experiencing something directly. In other words, my preconception was to expect that shoes ordered on Amazon — not exactly a bastion of up close and personal salesmanship — would fit simply because they should have.
However, now, courtesy of the Great Matador, I have emerged from beneath a cape of darkness into the light. I see that not only was I making a whopper of a sartorial misstep, expecting instant gratification via an online retailer, but that Amazon was christened Amazon for good reason. There are anacondas and piranhas in the Amazon rainforest.
Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
Yet even those who walk on mountaintops rather than in jungles got it before I did. “If you have too much expectation,” writes the Dalai Lama, a fan of Maine’s Dexter shoes, “you may come away disappointed.”
Adds golfer Ben Hogan, who preferred his work shoes with extra spikes, “Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.”
In other words, nix that pesky natural inclination to swing away at life with expectations.
Lo and behold, Science is agreeing with golfers and monks. Researchers at University College London have even come up with an equation that echoes their advice:
Dr. Robb Rutledge, senior research associate, explains further, “Lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness.”
Actually, people had come to this conclusion long before Robb perfected his equation — like in 500 BC, when an ancient Greek storyteller named Aesop came up with an expression we’re all familiar with, even if we ignore it. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
One thousand years later, the poet Thomas Howell put the proverb quite prettily to use, too:
Counte not thy Chickens that vnhatched be,
Waye wordes as winde, till thou finde certaintee.
However, the certaintee in all this extends far beyond not counting chickens. Lowering expectations is ‘Rithmatic. But what do you do when the Ultimate Retailer ships you a black beribboned Pandora’s Box you never ordered? Not only that, now that it’s here, it’s nonreturnable. Nothing else in life is adding up either. 2+2 suddenly equals 70,538.
Except you know darn well that even Advanced Differential Equations insists it’s 4.
The Stage 4 diagnosis, the phone call in the wee hours of the morning, the plane that never arrives, the death, the divorce… shoes that unexpectedly don’t fit can be a comeuppance and crazy-making inconvenience, but let’s get sane. They are pinpricks compared to the nuclear bomb the Universe may drop next Tuesday.
Pinpricks are also good practice. They help us rehearse how we will, one day, pick ourselves up, clean off and bandage our cuts, and then hobble with head high along whatever the hell road, yellow brick or otherwise, we’ve crash-landed beside — knocked nearly unconscious though we may be by twisters of shock and sorrow.
Confucius never set foot in Kansas, but he experienced it. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling,” he reminds us, “but in rising every time we fall.”
My great pal Anne the Irish Mystic likens hard circumstances to sandpaper. They refine us, she reassures me when I sulk. Bad things are actually good. Like mold in a jar of hot fudge, they are blessings in disguise. They keep us from getting even more fat in the head than we already are. Tough times teach us lessons we need to learn if we are to grow further.
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers,” says C.S. Lewis. “But you learn, my God, do you learn.”
Sometimes we learn secondhand, through the tragedies of others. I find myself remembering a young woman at a party. She was so fresh, so beautiful that the morning looked haggard beside her. Instantly, as we chattered, I christened her Lovely Dawn.
There was that kind of light about her — in her words and spirit as well as her appearance.
Mere weeks later, I received a stricken email from my daughter… “Lovely Dawn was killed by a crocodile!”
Suffice it to say, it takes a while for your brain to grasp a message like that.
However, the facts were inarguable. Lovely Dawn had been on holiday, where she encountered a crocodile and… well, I leave the rest up to you. I still pray for her pals. They tried to save Lovely Dawn. Imagine their dreams.
The story gets worse. The parents of Lovely Dawn had lost another child in another freak accident. Suddenly, Wham, Kaboom, two of their babies were gone. Gone, gone, gone in incomprehensible gale force winds of aberrancy, capriciousness, awfulness, senselessness.
I remember looking up at the sky when I learned the news, and saying, “I don’t think I am going to believe in You anymore.”
Eventually I found myself re-reading Rabbi Harold Kushner, who lost his young son to the premature aging disease, progeria. “Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?” the Rabbi asks. “The response would be… to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world…”
Some folks lump these sorts of difficult-to-forgive aberrations under free will. I prefer the definition of my priest pal, Father Michael, who calls it the wildness of God — although, in fairness to Michael, I must admit that he was referring to Ireland’s winters rather than homicidal crocodiles.
Nevertheless, God’s wildness envelops everything.
Ultimately all is shrouded in Mystery, whether it is a cherry blossom’s blooming or a mad reptile’s open mouth.
But, oh, how the wild, dark side of Mystery sucks! It sucks that my Dear Friend has cancer. It sucks that another friend’s husband has ALS. It sucks that a little girl wound up losing her life in a river.
It sure seems that God, being God, could have done a better job at arranging the entrees and side dishes served up to us on Life’s platter.
That said, I surrender. Pissed off and puzzled though I am, I surrender to the yin and yang of it all.
There are trees and there are squirrels and there are dawns, Lovely dawns, and moonrises and friends and lovers and beautiful shoes and lagoons that sparkle with lily pads and sun droplets.
And there is pain. And there is loss. And there is illness. And there is nightmare, and the mean people, wild beasts, mutated genes, cancerous cells, and freak occurrences that play leading roles in these blasphemies.
No, I can’t stop blasphemies from happening. But I can take a cue from the stars…
Like the stars, I can show up. Rather than hide away in clouds of petulance and funk, I can plunge through them — my rays a matador’s sword — and share whatever inner light I manage to muster until my time to glow and guide concludes and, mysteriously, somehow, blessedly, another star takes my place.
“Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Save it for a rainy day ” ~ Perry Como
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