Not All Nonsense Needs to Become "Sense"

I find that our pursuit to constantly make sense of nonsense is distracting us from true strength building: to withstand nonsense in order to yield more relief. We’re so quick to seek somewhere to place blame. When we grieve we tend to seek a reason why. When we hear of other people’s tragedies we seek reason to feel comforted by our own circumstances. When things don’t go our way – any way that might be what we’ve decided it needs to go to feel the way we want to feel – it’s much easier to go seeking somewhere or someone to blame. He did this, she said that, they forgot this…. Have we considered an alternative to that in the face of our aversions?

Instead of blaming someone else involved – or even yourself – could there be a more fundamental disagreement that lives within the nature of the parties involved? The environment and an event, a host and a guest, traffic behavior and the roads we drive within…these are all dynamics happening in relation to each other without the will of someone to blame. Sometimes shit goes wrong. A lot of times, things aren’t harmonious or in rhythm or aligned or getting along, and yet maybe that’s within their nature. We don’t need to change it or fix it. Our goal of making it better can be more about our capacity to endure hardship and uncertainty more than it needs to be about turning the wrong parts into right parts.

It’s this fix-it mentality that gets us in the most trouble. We aim for an outcome to declare it “done”. And while we go for the goal, we tend to forget about all the outcomes we’re living in real time that we aren’t naming or outlining as accomplishments. We’re tossing them away like disposable components of our lives leading to what really matters. Well newsflash: what really matters is already here, learn to strengthen your capacity to savor it. In the same way we can strengthen our capacity to endure hardship we can also strengthen our capacity to enjoy our pleasures. Replace the need to fix it with the choice to savor what’s right here, whether it makes sense or not.