Some sayings resonate with you and others don’t. “Everything happens for a reason,” doesn’t. “You do you,” does.
There’s something about “everything happens for a reason,” that doesn’t work for me. It just feels like a desperate attempt to explain the inexplicable.
Of course there is a reason for everything, but we aren’t always privy to that reason. Sometimes it’s just not worth banging your head against the wall trying to find answers to the question “why.”
I’ve lived long enough to realize that I can live a lot longer accepting some mystery in life. I don’t have to know or understand everything. Also, I don’t ask “why” nearly as often these days as I used to. I’ve learned to live with a measure of acceptance of stuff I just cannot control.
I keep a note paper on my office desk, a saying attributed to Laura Jean Truman. It serves as a reminder, which I don’t always heed, that I am not God and I don’t have super-human ability to control everything that I want to. “You can’t heal people you love. You can’t make choices for them. You can’t rescue them. You can promise that they won’t journey alone. You can loan them your map. But this trip is theirs.”
In fact, “it is what it is,” is another oft heard saying that suits me. Michael J Fox said that “acceptance doesn’t mean resignation but the understanding that something is what it is and there’s got to be a way through it.” Now that makes sense to me.
I’m a believer in a Christian notion that God doesn’t just whisk believers out of hard or impossible circumstances because we’re His children or His friends. I’ve tested that theory more than a few times in life.
Instead, God has our backs through hard times, never leaving nor forsaking us. It’s way cool to have a “friend” in high places, to know someone.
I really like the permission that “you do you,” gives us to live our lives the best way that we see fit. The concept reflects a commitment to keep your judgments to yourself. You’re telling everybody whom you encounter to “be yourself,” “you do you.”
In terms of self-permission to be yourself, do you always know who “you” are? Early in the Spring, I took some notes which I titled, “You Who?” I was in a position to seek a diagnosis for a small myriad of surprise maladies.
It felt somewhat like, if you’re old enough you will get the reference to dwelling in “The Twilight Zone.” It feels like I turned around in a fairy-tale, fog kind of thing, and I’m like this.
The advice, “you do you,” is hard to follow when you don’t yet recognize you in this manifestation of you. Along the way, you deal with doctors, and you pass people who buck the health care system to forge an alternative path. But the thing is, none of this is you.
You feel slightly desperate to find answers to questions you don’t know who to ask. You think, “this is not cancer, stop winching about every little thing.” You might sound like a freaking, raving, lunatic, who is not you. Who are you?
I’ve made a decision to be myself in a fluid kind of way. I’m trying to stay receptive to the point of view of others yet keep my own counsel, so to speak.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages…” In other words, you be you, and don’t wholly depend upon the experts who wish to guide your life from without.
Nobody knows you like you do. The Scripture in I Corinthians 2, verse 11 confirms this, “For what person knows the thoughts and motives of a man except the man’s spirit within him?”
So, even when all manner of mysterious happenings hover over your life, take heart to know that not only are you not alone, but you can trust yourself. You be you and hang in there until another manifestation of you emerges from within and do that you.