We Plan, God Laughs

This or something even better for the highest good of all concerned

Inwood Hill Park, Winter Solstice 2020

Last year at around this time I sat in front of the fireplace at Soho House in the Meatpacking District, hot tea served at a swanky table, notebook and pen in hand, plotting out my vision for 2020.

I don’t need to tell you how that panned out. 

“We plan, God laughs,“ goes the Yiddish proverb. By January 3 I could hardly make sense of anything, let alone make plans outside of my brother’s memorial. And by mid-March, just as I slowly started coming out of the fog of grief, the lessons I naïvely thought only applied to me crested like a wave over all of us.

When I sat before that fireplace last year, I listed out all of my personal and professional achievements over the past decade, looking forward to the new era ahead and closing out the last. I recognized the moments of doubt, anxiety, and impatience that came between those mile markers, but I kept that darkness mainly to myself. Celebrating my achievements doesn’t come easily and I tend to speed by the results as I look to the horizon for the next thing. What struck me as I listed those achievements was the near constant sense of uncertainty I remembered feeling throughout the decade. I was often unsure if I was making the right decision, anxious about where each choice would lead, and kept asking for clarity, for some sort of promise of things to come. After so many losses this year, I have often found myself feeling the same way.

In this year of shock, searches for the term “uncertain times” spiked as COVID diagnoses and deaths climbed. Since March, about 219,000 headlines from US-based publications have featured all sorts of suggestions on how to meditate, knit, invest and advertise your way out of these “uncertain times.” So many ads sought to console us with promises that we would get through these “uncertain times” that parodies began to crop up on YouTube, Twitter and beyond. 

I get why we all over-rely on these words. When worlds are upended by an ominous and strange disease, canceling conferences, flights, birthdays, funerals, forcing us all into our homes for days or months, despite our well-worn plans: we look for answers, for clarity, for certainty. But the search goes on, because the answers do not exist. 

Buddhism teaches that all things are impermanent and that change is the only constant. It is only our awareness that has the potential to grow. In that awareness, if we are lucky, we can trade a sense of knowing for clarity or certainty. 

Despite this newfound understanding, I find myself hoping for the coming year. So much good has happened this year amidst the suffering. I recently signed with a literary agent who is representing my work (this is what is called “burying the lede,” by the way) with the aim of publishing my book. I am collecting all of the poems I wrote this year and am exploring putting them out in the world in some form. I am looking forward to the second year of the interfaith seminary program I began this September. Soon, Ben and I will fulfill a dream we have dreamed together for more than a decade. (I’ll have to tell you about it another time for fear of jinxing it. The reality of life hasn’t yet shaken superstition from these limbs.) And I pray that my family and I will soon have the opportunity to come together to honor Oscar by adding his remains to the root of a new tree, mixing dirt and ashes to create something new.

“The universe is designed to be resilient,” a wise colleague recently said of his personal experience of loss and the search for meaning in its wake. It is true. Life is birthed out of darkness. No running, hiding, or planning can keep it at bay. Each and every one of us has experienced profound loss this year. And as we consciously find our way through this collective grieving we are effectively choosing life, finding meaning where we can, actively building something new. We tend and nurture this life and if we are fortunate we reap the gift “a box full of darkness” might bring. 

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest and darkest day of the year, a celestial symbol of death and rebirth. So we pause and reflect on the loss of what has come before, the year of sorrow, and the moments of joy we have bravely enjoyed in the midst of suffering, finding gratitude between the many tears. To honor these changes we see around us is to honor the changes we see within ourselves. And with each coming day, if we are lucky enough to open our eyes to it, the blazing sun grows stronger, deeper, and brings us back toward another dawn, to greet the light of day.  

May your days be warm and bathed in that light.