I was standing on a beach on a beautiful sunny day, feeling great about my accomplishment. Something I’d been working on for 5 years was finally completed. The air felt clean and crisp, making breathing easy. And then the fog rolled in. Deep gray mist surrounded me, blocking out all sources of light, including the sun. I couldn’t see two feet in front of me. I turned around, stumbling in the sand, trying to find my way back to the world. I couldn’t breath through the heaviness and I paused.
Out of the saturated air, questions were thrown at me, hypotheses as to why it happened and when and to whom swirled around me. They hammered at me over and over again until I fell to my knees, clutching my head. Everything I worked for was shredded by the fog and the persistent open-ended questions for which I didn’t have answers. Why did I do this? Why did I choose the world I did when I could’ve taken the easy road? My head bowed to the pressure of nothing fitting like it should. Why, why, why echoed through my brain as I realized the futility of it all.
And then, out of the darkness around me, I heard a voice speaking, explaining, theorizing, not asking endless questions I couldn’t answer. I knew that voice well. He said, “I’ll make sense of the chaos. Let me work on it and play with it. It doesn’t make sense now, but it will.” The frustration continued to stifle the air I tried to breathe, but underneath it all, I began to hope that it wasn’t for nothing, that my project could be saved, explained, that it could make sense without losing too much of what I’d already put into it. I began to hope. And breathed a bit easier again.