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The Things We Cannot Explain

There was a time when I held onto the phrase “everything happens for a reason” as though understanding the reason would somehow make difficult things easier to carry. I liked the certainty of it. Five words capable of placing a neat ribbon around experiences that otherwise made absolutely no sense. When something went wrong, there must be a reason. When a door closed, another one must be waiting somewhere. When somebody left, perhaps they were never meant to stay. When life disappointed me, surely there was a lesson hidden underneath it all. It was comforting to believe that pain came with an explanation, even if the explanation had not arrived yet.

I still understand why people say it. Most of the time, I think it comes from kindness. We see someone hurting and immediately want to give them something that might make the weight lighter. We reach for familiar sentences because silence feels inadequate. Everything happens for a reason. Stay strong. It will all make sense someday. Something better is coming. We say these things because standing beside someone else’s pain without being able to fix it can make us feel helpless, and human beings are not particularly comfortable with helplessness.

But the older I get, the less certain I am that every painful thing needs to be explained. Life has shown me enough to know that some experiences refuse to fit inside comforting sentences. There are diagnoses that divide a person’s life into before and after. There are phone calls nobody expects to receive. There are betrayals from people we trusted completely. There are relationships that end despite how desperately someone wanted them to survive. There are dreams people spend years building only to watch circumstances dismantle them. There are people who leave home expecting to return that evening and never do. There are goodbyes that happen before anyone is ready to say them. And sometimes, when somebody is standing in the middle of that kind of pain, “everything happens for a reason” is simply too small a sentence for what they are carrying.

I think that is what changed for me. I stopped asking every painful experience to immediately justify its existence. Not everything painful becomes poetic simply because enough time passes. Not every loss eventually turns into something we would choose again because of what it taught us. Some experiences remain things we wish had never happened. Some people would gladly return every lesson if it meant getting back what they lost. Some wounds may eventually become easier to carry without ever becoming something we are grateful to have received. And I think we should be allowed to say that.

Not every painful chapter needs to become beautiful before we are allowed to turn the page.

There is something almost instinctive in our desire to make suffering meaningful. Perhaps meaning makes pain feel less random. If there is a reason, then perhaps the world still feels organised. Perhaps there is still a pattern somewhere beneath the chaos. We like beginnings, middles and endings. We like stories where the difficult chapter eventually explains itself. We like storms followed by rainbows and heartbreak followed by something better because those narratives reassure us that suffering is temporary and justice eventually arrives. Real life, however, has never been particularly interested in following the structure of a good novel.

Sometimes good people lose. Sometimes people who have already carried too much are handed something else to carry. Sometimes the apology never comes. Sometimes the person who hurt you moves forward without ever understanding what they did. Sometimes you work incredibly hard and still do not get the opportunity. Sometimes you pray with everything inside you and receive an answer completely different from the one you wanted. And sometimes there is no satisfying explanation waiting at the end of the chapter.

I think maturity has changed the kinds of answers I require from life. When I was younger, I wanted everything explained. I wanted to know why. Why did this happen? Why did that person leave? Why did this opportunity disappear? Why did life take this direction instead of the one I carefully planned? There was always a part of me that believed understanding something would give me control over it. But knowing why does not always change what happened. Sometimes the explanation arrives and the pain remains. Sometimes there is no explanation at all. And strangely, I am learning that peace does not always require one.

There is a certain freedom in admitting, I don’t know why this happened. Not everything has to be solved like a puzzle. Not every painful memory contains a secret message we failed to decode. Some things happened, and then we had to learn how to live in the world that existed afterwards. Maybe that sounds less comforting than everything happens for a reason, but to me it has become more compassionate.

Because when we insist too quickly that suffering must have a purpose, we can unintentionally place another responsibility on the person already carrying it. Now they are not only expected to survive what happened; they are also expected to find the lesson, discover the blessing, become stronger, forgive beautifully and eventually produce an inspirational ending. That is an exhausting amount of work to assign someone who is simply trying to get through the day.

Sometimes people do not need to hear what their pain is going to teach them. Sometimes they need permission to say, This hurts, and have someone answer, I know. Nothing more. No philosophy. No explanation. No attempt to repair the moment. Just presence.

I think we underestimate how powerful that can be. We often assume helping means saying the right thing. Perhaps that is because words give us something to do. Silence feels passive. Sitting beside somebody while they cry can feel insufficient. We want to offer solutions, perspectives and reminders that things will eventually improve. But some moments are not asking us to be wise. They are asking us to stay. There are pains that do not need our explanations. They need our willingness to remain in the room when there is nothing useful left to say.

I have come to appreciate people who understand that distinction. The people who do not rush grief. The people who do not tell you how you should feel because somebody else supposedly had it worse. The people who do not become uncomfortable when you are not ready to be positive yet. The people who can listen to the same story more than once because they understand that sometimes repetition is part of how we process what happened. The people who do not immediately turn your pain into a lesson.

There is an enormous difference between someone listening because they are waiting for their turn to speak and someone listening because they genuinely want to understand. You can feel it. One person hears the facts. The other notices the weight. Perhaps that is why being understood can feel so deeply comforting. Pain can be incredibly isolating, even when other people are physically around us. You can sit in a room full of people and still feel as though nobody quite understands what is happening inside you. Then one person says something that tells you they actually see it—not the polished version, not the brave version, not the version you have learned to present so everyone else does not worry. The real version. And suddenly the burden has not disappeared, but you are no longer carrying it entirely alone.

Maybe that is what empathy really is. Not taking someone’s pain away. Not explaining it. Not comparing it. Just helping them carry its existence for a while.

I also think we need to be careful with the way we admire strength. We love stories about people who survived terrible things and became stronger afterwards. There is something undeniably powerful about resilience. I have met people whose suffering made them extraordinarily compassionate. People who experienced grief and became gentler with the grief of others. People who knew what it felt like to struggle and later became the person they once needed. People who turned painful experiences into advocacy, kindness, art, purpose or service. Those stories matter, but I do not think the suffering deserves the credit. The person does.

Pain does not automatically make people stronger. Sometimes people become stronger because they decide that pain will not be allowed to take everything from them.

That distinction matters to me. I do not want to romanticise suffering by pretending difficult things are secretly gifts simply because something good eventually grew afterwards. Flowers growing over ruins do not mean the destruction was necessary. They mean life found a way to continue there. Perhaps people are like that too.

We create meaning. We rebuild. We adapt. We learn new versions of ourselves. We discover compassion we did not know we possessed. We change priorities. We become more careful about who receives our time. We learn which battles deserve our energy and which ones do not. We sometimes become softer. Sometimes stronger. Sometimes quieter. Sometimes completely different. But that meaning does not always prove that the painful thing needed to happen. It proves that something inside us continued afterwards. There is a difference.

I think this is where my relationship with “everything happens for a reason” has changed most. I do not necessarily reject the possibility that some events eventually reveal a purpose or that God can bring meaning from circumstances we never would have chosen. I have lived through enough moments that only made sense much later to know that perspective can change with time. There are doors I was once devastated to see close that I later understood differently. There are disappointments that redirected me towards something I could not see at the time. There are experiences that shaped parts of me I now value.

But I have also learned that faith and honesty can exist in the same room. I can believe that God is present without pretending I understand everything He allows. I can trust Him and still say something hurts. I can pray and still have questions. I can believe there is meaning beyond what I can see while refusing to force meaning onto somebody else’s pain before they are ready to find any.

Maybe that is a gentler form of faith. Not insisting that every tragedy be explained immediately, but believing that even when explanations fail, presence does not.

Sometimes I think we confuse hope with optimism. Optimism says everything will work out exactly as we want. Hope is quieter. Hope says that even if life does not return to what it was before, perhaps something inside us will eventually learn how to continue. Hope does not need to deny pain in order to survive it.

And perhaps that is why some of the people who have comforted me most were not the ones who had the best advice. They were simply the ones who knew how to be there. They did not rush to fill every silence. They did not try to find the perfect sentence. They did not treat sadness like a problem that needed immediate correction. Sometimes they just listened.

That kind of presence stays with you.

We tend to remember the people who made difficult moments feel less lonely. Not necessarily because they changed the circumstances, but because they changed the experience of carrying them. There is something deeply human about knowing another person is willing to sit beside you even when there is nothing they can do.

Maybe that is one of the greatest forms of kindness.

To stop trying to make someone’s pain more comfortable for ourselves.
To let it be complicated.
To let grief take longer than expected.
To let questions remain questions.
To understand that someone’s sadness does not always require our solution.

We are allowed to say, I don’t know why this happened.
We are allowed to admit that some experiences were unfair.
We are allowed to wish certain chapters had never been written.
And we are also allowed, in our own time, to create something meaningful from what remains.

Maybe meaning is not always something hidden inside the event waiting for us to discover it. Maybe sometimes meaning is what we choose to build afterwards. The compassion we develop. The boundary we finally learn to draw. The person we become more attentive to because we now understand what a particular kind of pain feels like. The courage to begin again. The decision to remain kind despite having every reason to harden.

There is something powerful about that because it leaves room for both truth and hope. It does not require us to call suffering beautiful. It simply acknowledges that beauty can still exist after suffering.

Maybe that is enough.

These days, when someone tells me something painful, I try to resist the instinct to immediately turn it into a lesson. I do not always get it right. Sometimes familiar phrases still appear because we have been taught for years that comfort requires words. But I am learning that perhaps the better question is not, What should I say? Perhaps it is, What does this person need from me right now?

Sometimes the answer will be advice. Sometimes practical help. Sometimes encouragement. And sometimes it will simply be someone willing to listen without hurrying them towards the version of the story where everything is okay again.

Maybe one day the reason will become clear.
Maybe it will not.
Maybe the person will eventually find meaning in what happened.
Maybe they will simply learn to carry it differently.

Either way, they should not have to prove that their pain served a purpose before it deserves compassion.

I still hear the phrase “everything happens for a reason,” and part of me still understands the comfort people are trying to offer when they say it. Maybe there are reasons we cannot yet see. Maybe there are things that will make more sense when enough distance has passed. Maybe some chapters are understood only after we have lived much farther into the book.

But I no longer think every hurting person needs that sentence immediately. Sometimes a better sentence is much simpler.

I’m here.

Tell me.

You don’t have to make sense of this yet.

Because there are moments when answers cannot change what happened. Explanations cannot return what was lost. Advice cannot shorten grief. But presence can make the loneliness a little smaller. And perhaps that is something worth remembering the next time we find ourselves searching for the perfect words to give someone who is hurting. We may not need perfect words at all.