My great-grandmother once rode a bus for the better part of a day with her dying son in her arms, and then, a few days later, rode the same bus home with his cold body wrapped in a quilt she’d stitched by hand. 

I’ve written elsewhere about what that loss was and, importantly, was not. It was not a gift, and it was was not a plan, but was fertile ground for growth and purpose. I flesh out the distinction here. But the question I’m more interested in unpacking is whether a senseless thing can still be meaningful. And if it can, does it matter where that meaning comes from? 

Humans have wrestled with where meaning comes from for as long as we’ve been burying our dead. But the last century sharpened it into a genuine standoff: is meaning something we discover, already woven into the world, or something we invent, with no help from the cosmos at all? It’s worth knowing the sides, because we all take one, whether we announce it or keep it to ourselves.

The great writer and philosopher Camus called the universe absurd. Not evil or cruel, just silent and indifferent to our very human need for it to make sense. He would not pretend the silence was secretly speaking; that, he said, is the “leap of faith,” smuggling a reason back in. Nor would he let the silence win. Meaning, for Camus, does not lie in the event itself like an old copper penny found in a field. It is made, asserted, like a personal revolt, in the face of a cosmos that does not care about you.

Sartre, his contemporary, put the same knife to the same bone: existence precedes essence, he famously wrote, which is another way of saying that no experience arrives stamped with meaning or purpose. We are, in his unlovely but liberating phrase, condemned to be free; condemned, that is, to author our own meaning out of whatever pain visits us across a lifetime.

That is meaning as the existentialists saw it: made, not found. And it is not, by design, very comforting, though it is where I take the most comfort from, ironically. Most of the world’s wisdom traditions answer the other way. They say that meaning is discovered rather than invented, though they disagree about where it waits. 

The Stoics placed it not in the event but in your bearing toward it: a mother cannot govern the fever that takes her child — only what she does in its wake — and that last unassailable freedom is where a life is built. 

Taoism declines the question outright. The farmer whose horse runs off, whose son then breaks his leg on that very horse, but who then escapes conscription into war (as the parable goes), cannot yet say what is fortune and what is ruin, because the story is never over: good luck, bad luck, who knows? 

Buddhism calls the loss neither random nor purposed but caused, arising from conditions, so that peace comes not from explaining the death but from loosening the grip that demands it mean anything at all. 

And the Abrahamic faiths hold that the meaning is real and already there, kept in a mind larger than ours even when it stays hidden: that no one is ever truly lost, only known, and held, and kept.

These are the great answers — made or found, invented or waiting — and for a long time I thought choosing between them was the task. Then I read Frankl, a man who had tested all of it in a crucible none would have chosen.

While Camus and Sartre theorized the absurd from cafés and lamplit studies, Viktor Frankl watched meaning keep human beings alive in the death camps of Nazi Germany. By rights his testimony should have settled the argument. And in a way, I suppose, it did, just not in the direction you’d expect. 

Frankl came down with the traditionalists: meaning, he insisted, already exists in the world, waiting to be discovered rather than invented. And yet the man who most believed meaning was found agreed with the men who believed it was made on the one point that turned out to matter more than the whole dispute: that the meaning is never in the suffering itself. Only ever in the response to it.

Though I was raised in the church and studied the wisdom traditions of the world in college, even considering (for a hot minute that is) divinity school or a major in World Religions, I ultimately chose to become a writer because that way, I’d never have to pick — existentialist or Buddhist or pagan — I could pry open every tradition’s oyster and rob it of its pearls.

I’ve made a career out of thinking deeply about these kinds of questions, and on this particular point I’ve decided that the argument about made or discovered, bestowed or authored is, well, besides the point. Found or made, discovered or invented, handed down by some God or asserted in private revolt, it changes nothing about what is actually required of you. Because every one of these traditions and philosophies, however far apart, asks the sufferer for the identical thing in the end. 

The Stoic must work his response. The Buddhist must work his release. The believer must work her surrender. The existentialist must work his revolution. The meaning — whether it was lying in the field all along or had to be forged in the dark — stays inert until a living hand picks it up and does something with it. And this is the part that no tradition or worldview can spare us of. 

It took me years, and a fair amount of pawing my way through the dark of my own wreckage, to understand what that hand was reaching for. I’d gone looking in theology and philosophy — the study of the answers — when the thing that finally moved anything in me was actually far more ordinary. 

I simply wrote it down. 

Not to feel better...exactly. But because putting the losses into words was how I stopped being written by them.

A loss you refuse to work does not sit quietly in your mind; it narrates like a Victorian novelist paid by the word. It decides who you are now. It replays on its own schedule. It drafts your future on its own terms. The work is how you take the pen back, not to erase what happened, but to become, once again, the author of what happens next. And notice: it makes no difference whether you believe the pen was placed in your hand or you picked it up yourself. Either way, nothing gets written, or rewritten, until you write it.

This is why we should stop arguing about which tradition is right. You do not have to settle whether your suffering was authored by God, or physics, or The Fates, before you are allowed to begin. You do not have to know where meaning comes from to start making it. The philosophers can keep the question because the rest of us have work to do.

They lived in a rural town in lower Alabama, and while there were country doctors, and even a hospital, of sorts, downtown, they could not treat much beyond bone resets and straightforward births. So my great-grandmother, desperate to save her child, took the bus north toward Birmingham, a grueling eight-to-twelve-hour ride back then, with Harold across her lap, his feverish head in the crook of her arm. 

Some days later, after every effort was spent, she took that same bus home with him again in her lap, but this time gone.

When well-meaning people tell me pain is secretly a gift, I think about her, and about Harold. We’ve all heard it, in different seasons and different mouths. Sometimes it’s your cousin in the kitchen, pulling the CorningWare from the oven after the funeral: everything happens for a reason. Or it’s the neighbor beside you in a pew who whispers after the convocation: God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, honey. Or it’s your best friend popping the cork on a bottle too expensive for a Tuesday because your husband just ran off with the secretary, so, fuck it. As P!NK said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yea?

I understand the reach. It’s unbearable to watch someone you love in agony and have nothing to offer but words, wine, or a heaping scoop of chicken n’ broccoli casserole. So we grasp for the thing that makes the suffering mean something, and for many, that thing is faith. I don’t say that with a sneer either. I’m a person of deep conviction myself, though more mystic than Sunday-morning regular. Even so, I'm no stranger to the need to hold onto something beyond the wreckage until you can catch your breath and swim for shore. 

But this essay is for the rest of us: the ones wrestling with the hard parts of being human outside the mainframe of organized religion; those who can’t quite concede that a peanut, a bus ticket, and a boy who couldn’t breathe were part of a plan, let alone a gift. For us — or I should say for me — Harold’s death was random, senseless, pure chance, the Universe's favorite currency. Or, looked at through a mythological lens, it was nothing more than the Fates measuring out their woolen thread and cutting it short. And the evidence that this was a terrible, senseless thing is that terrible, senseless things happen to good, kind, bad, young, old, deserving, and not-deserving people all the time. For us — or, I should say, me again — better an empty sky than a God who would draw up these particular plans.

And yet, even outside the frame of faith, a senseless thing can still be meaningful, so long as you don’t confuse the gift with fertile ground.

Let's break down the difference. 

A gift is authored by someone else. It is handed to you for a reason; its meaning decided before you ever arrive. Your only task is to receive it with gratitude. Within the Christian and broader Abrahamic frame, this holds together on its own terms. Before an omnipotent and perfect God, fallen creatures are in no position to audit the ledger, and even suffering is received as something to be thanked for. But from where we stand, what you're really asking is for a grieving mother to thank the giver for the taking.

Fertile ground is a different posture to loss, and it asks for none of that. It names no giver and demands no gratitude. It makes a smaller, harder, and — I’d argue — more dignified claim: that no one wrote a purpose into what happened to you, which means no one but you gets to decide what grows from it. The gift asks you to receive and accept and be grateful. Kinda like a kid getting socks for Christmas. Fertile ground lets you author. And that authorship — the meaning you make from the pain — is the one thing a loss (no matter whether it simply arrived or was bestowed) can never reclaim.

My great-grandmother would not have thought much of my argument. She was a Christian, deep and unwavering in her belief. Where I see indifferent chance, she would have seen a plan. Where I refuse the gift, she would have gladly received it, trusting that Harold was wanted elsewhere, that she would hold him again when her own turn came to travel there, that a reason existed even if it stayed hidden from her for the rest of her earthly life. And though this might surprise you, I find her conviction stunningly beautiful.

And yet our disagreement changes nothing about what came next. Because whatever she believed about the why of her son’s sudden death, she still had to do the work of making a life on the other side of it. Her faith may have told her that God gave her the strength, but she was still the one who had to expend that strength to survive. It may have promised her new seeds would grow, but she was still the one who had to plant them into that hard, cold ground, and wait out every season of the rest of her life without her boy.

Funny, how grace (as in the unearned favor from God) and chance leave you standing in the same field, holding the same shovel. The story you tell about how the ground got there changes nothing about the fact that only with your shoulder to the plow will something good ever grow out of that broken ground.

So tell me, dear reader: what broken ground were you handed, and what have you managed to grow there?

Comment below. I read every one.

Next in this series: if meaning can be made, the philosophers spent a century arguing over whether we invent it or discover it. I’ve come to think they were fighting about the wrong thing.

One of the most thoughtful emails I received after my TEDx talk came from someone who said she’d gone out and bought “the most aesthetically pleasing little journal” she could find because, after years of journaling, which “never worked,” she wanted to give directed expressive writing, which is intentionally not journaling, a go.

I have a soft spot for beautiful things, especially notebooks. After all, my Moon is in Taurus. Oh, did you think I was all neuroscience and no woo? Hardly. More like a curious scholar with a mystical streak who insists on evidence.

I love tarot, too, though probably not for the reason you think. To me, tarot isn’t about predicting the future. It’s one of humanity’s oldest storytelling technologies. The cards help me notice symbols, myths, and possibilities I might otherwise miss. They ask better questions than they answer.

Which is why I loved that she’d bought herself a beautiful notebook.

A beautiful notebook doesn’t change the science of expressive writing. But rituals change us, making practices like expressive writing often more effective. Behavioral scientists have found that symbolic fresh starts, whether they’re birthdays, celebrations of life, New Year’s Day, Monday coffee stops before work, and yes, beautiful new notebooks, increase our willingness to begin difficult things. Sometimes the first step in a directed writing practice is as simple as making the page feel like an invitation, not an obligation.

But then I found myself giving her advice that probably surprised us both. I told her she might not want to start writing just yet. Wait...wasn’t my entire recent TEDx talk about the power and need of cultivating a writing practice in your own life?

Yes.

And.

One of the most common misconceptions about directed expressive writing is that if it helps us process difficult experiences, then using it immediately after something terrible happens must be even better.

You know: get it out instead of gutting it out?

It’s a compelling instinct. But science, alas, has the importantly annoying habit of complicating perfectly reasonable instincts.

Research suggests expressive writing works best when we’re able to move beyond simply reliving an experience and begin organizing it into a coherent narrative. That means integrating facts, feelings, causes, and meaning. It isn’t simply emotional expression (which is one way it’s vastly different from journaling). It’s meaning-making.

Immediately after a traumatic event, the brain has a different job. It isn’t asking, What does this mean? It’s asking, What the hell just happened?

In the days and weeks after trauma, many of us are still physiologically dysregulated. We may be sleep deprived, emotionally reactive, still dealing with practical crises, or still exposed to the stressor itself. Our brains are trying to survive, not understand.

James Pennebaker, whose research helped establish expressive writing as an evidence-based intervention, has noted that for many people it may be better to wait a month or two before using the classic protocol. Not because writing is harmful, but because writing too soon may keep us reliving an experience that our minds and bodies haven’t yet had the capacity to organize into a story, however poorly composed.¹

As a writer, I’d much rather look at the hard parts sooner than later. 

As a scholar, I appreciate nuance.

And as a human, I’m learning that healing isn’t always about finding the right words. Sometimes it’s about waiting until your brain and body are finally ready to hear them.

I’m curious: Have you ever discovered that something which ultimately helped you only worked because you weren’t ready for it the first time?

The boring (but important!) stuff: ¹ James W. Pennebaker, Opening Up by Writing It Down; Baikie & Wilhelm (2005), “Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expressive Writing,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. Harvard Health also summarizes Pennebaker’s recommendation that many people wait several weeks after an acute trauma before beginning the classic expressive writing protocol: https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/writing-about-emotions-may-ease-stress-and-trauma