Calm • Perspective
The Universe Has a Plan for You
The very sizeable piece of cosmic real estate we call the universe does not – at first glance – seem especially hospitable to, or concerned with, anything remotely connected to human beings. None of its two trillion galaxies, each containing up to a thousand billion stars, seems able to support life. Its rotations and expansions proceed without the slightest reference to human time or measure. Tonight’s dinner and the broken bathroom tap must seem like very small things indeed from the perspective of our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri – 4.2 light years away – steadily burning through its four-trillion-year lifespan.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, D. Sand, K. Sheth
Nevertheless, some of us are prone, when puzzling or painful events befall us, to deploy an unusual-sounding term. In relation to our reversals, we may whisper to ourselves: ‘The universe is teaching me a lesson.’ When a friend is in tears, we may respond gently: ‘The universe perhaps had another plan for you…’ And we might account for yet another delay to our hopes by saying: ‘The universe is calling for me to be more patient.’
When we speak like this, we are no longer conceiving of the universe as a vast, implacable system governed solely by the laws of astrophysics. It becomes a far more intimate, beneficent force, intensely connected to our destinies – a force that wants us to grow and, most importantly, to learn; to accede to our better selves, to understand who we really are and to accept a necessary role for pain and mystery within a broadly good, fruitful and eventually comprehensible account of our lives.
The universe may not – perhaps – give a jot about us. And yet, to speak in poetic or metaphorical terms as if it might can be classified as the height of therapeutic wisdom. Doing so trains our minds to search always for a submerged upside to appalling or puzzling situations, and to develop the will to discern pieces of psychological instruction in what might otherwise simply be a ghastly, undesired mess.
We receive a threatening medical diagnosis: the universe is trying to teach us to focus on what we really want from our work while there is still time. An adored partner leaves us for someone else: we’re being taught, we eventually conclude, to develop a less anxious style of attachment so that we can be more reassuring to our next lover.
This ideology accepts that we may not always know what the universe’s lesson for us might be; we’re simply encouraged to believe that there is likely to be one. Why did we fail to make friends? We can’t say yet, but the universe will yield an explanation in time. Why did the person we went on a date with disappear so suddenly after a promising start? We don’t know yet, but the universe will have had some idea in mind. Why are we passing through such a troubled and frightened period? The universe is a giant classroom, and it is for us – its humble students – to trust in, and remain steady in the face of, its ongoing educational mission.
We must – along the way – accept an implicit bargain: the universe has no alternative but to teach many of its lessons through pain. Lovers abandon us, plans fall through, enemies attack us. The universe wills us not to panic or despair. Why is everyone turning us down? Why is no one calling? Why does no one seem to care? Why didn’t she answer? Where is he? We may not know precisely. Yet, we can trust that – with time – some form of redemptive learning, however raw or austere, will emerge.
In our way of framing matters, we are – at one level – at risk of being far too modest about what we’re up to. It’s not, of course, the universe that reveals meaning. It’s our own brilliant and resilient minds that process, reframe and interpret the difficulties we face. We are the ones arduously teasing out moral instructions, reminding ourselves not to despair and forging consoling summaries, not the resolutely mute galaxy Messier 87 in the Virgo Cluster or the equally obtuse Centaurus A in the constellation Centaurus. And yet how clever of us to deftly attribute our compassionate efforts to a mightier and nobler entity, into whom we can project some of the confidence we too often unfairly fail to muster for ourselves. We speak great truths, and then have the canniness to put them into the mouth of the mightiest, most awe-inspiring force we know – so as to be able to benefit from them as fully and as effectively as we deserve.
