A Friendly Mystery

What if you didn't fear the future?

Hello Loves!

I’m on vacation in western MA, where (especially in summer) it’s easy to be way more Pollyanna than Doomsday, so I thought I’d take a minute to share my serene joy with you (catch!).

Especially because I know last week was hard—I was there too. A political assassination that was immediately coopted by a cynical MAGA disinfo campaign. Law enforcement and military shooting peaceful protestors (and each other!) with rubber bullets in LA. One of my senators, who happens to be Latino, hogtied in a Kristi Noem presser for having the audacity to ask a question. And a boondoggle of a military parade.

It would be easy to draw a line through everything that is happening and then continue it, holding our pencil to the paper against a ruler, and overconfidently predict that the future will be even worse. It may be a way of protecting ourselves from what we feel is inevitable doom.

Except that we might be wrong. We might be unnecessarily saddled with a confirmation bias for terrible things.

The future is a mystery. Why not decide it is a friendly one? That things might just as easily turn out well, or even glorious beyond imagining?

Card that says “Greetings from your Future! It’s so bright here!”

The fact that the future IS a mystery (despite various posturing techbros’ overly confident analyses of what’s to come if we give them enough tax breaks and untrammeled power) is something to be celebrated. You yourself are a mystery, and oh-how-important that is these days.

“As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go.

Wendell Berry, the Mad Farmer Liberation Front

What makes hoping hard is that we don’t know how much worse things will get (heat wave in Alaska! New old wars in the Middle East!).

Here’s a secret: God lives in the future. She’s gotten there first, and she’s waiting patiently with open arms. We still need to muddle through this construct called “time” to get to Her. Where she stands, feet planted, thick thighs braced for us to run hard into her arms–the current suffering has come to an end, the pain and fear resolved to some degree? We can collapse and rest at the end of our perilous journey.

This future might just as easily be true. Why give more credence to the worst that can happen than the best?

It doesn’t mean we can bypass the pain along the way. But leaning into the future as a “friendly mystery” would give us more courage and joy along the journey itself.

It’s the unfriendly mystery we fear. If we could, like Letterman, only lop off that “un-”, we could change our right now.

As some of you know, I’m a fearful flyer. I’ve done a lot work on myself over the years, because not flying is not an option when your aging father and many other people you love live 3,000 miles away.

The best new tool I’ve discovered to help deal with the fear that my plane will suddenly plummet from the sky (the news these days not really helping!) is this /fearofflying subreddit which is one of the kindest places on the Internet. There are pilots who stand by just to post reassuring explainers on nearly every comment. Other fearful flyers who, if you put up your flight number, will track it in real time while you are in the sky and cheerlead you along the way (“you’re past that cluster of thunderstorms near Dallas and well on your way to Denver!”).

And my favorite part: how everyone encourages you to get on that plane in the first place. “Focus on where you’re going, the fun you’re going to have when you get there, how it will feel to be reunited with your people. If you freak out and cancel your flight, your anxiety will only be worse next time–that’s how anxiety works. You can’t let it win. Instead, think of all the good stuff that’s waiting for you at the other end.”

I thought of all my new Reddit compatriots when I got on my very bumpy flight to Boston the other day. I cracked open a book my daughter gave me that was so juicy I didn’t put it down even when the siren song of free movies to distract me from turbulence beckoned. When I would usually yelp at being rattled around at 36,000 feet, instead I focused on the friendly mysteries waiting for me below, and I flew to them. When the older man two rows ahead of me had a medical emergency, I suppressed the fear that the plane would have to make an emergency landing and delay my travels, and instead warmed up my blessing hands and turned them on him for a while.

The plane landed safely in Boston hours later. I drove west from Logan. And here and now, I’m lying under a handmade quilt at my oldest friend’s house in a little valley, rain falling steadily as a heartbeat. Birds undeterred by the wet weather singing us all awake, the smell of good earth and the flower garden below drifting in the window. In a minute I’ll walk out into that garden in my bare feet and pick kale for a breakfast salad, sit and snuggle with my friend and our young adult kids on the screen porch while various dogs wander through begging to have scruffs scratched. All is well. And the future? A friendly mystery.

A puce zinnia from bestie Les’s side yard in the Pioneer Valley.

I know there’s an obtuse kind of privilege in saying this. How dare I, with children starving to death in Gaza? Sometimes I think about how extreme the suffering is there, and wonder–how do they keep going? How do they not just make what would be a legitimate choice to take matters into their own hands and release themselves from earthly pain? And all I can imagine is–despite the constant violence and threat of violence, grief, fear, hunger, pain, unimaginable suffering–they must also have an unimpeachable hope, if they are willing to keep going. A fierce joy in whatever small victories they win day by day (a snuggle, a song, a loaf of bread), and a untoward belief in a friendlier mystery that lies ahead, where God is waiting for them.

If they can keep going, day after day, what right do any of us have to ignore the many good things right in front of us? How dare we pull a long face, steep ourselves in anger and anxiety as a twisted exercise in virtue or expensive insurance against future disappointment?

Instead, I invite you to sit in myopic appreciation for all the goodness that is beside you right now. And then turn your gaze to the future, as if it were all friendly mystery.

Here’s a song to take you there – MaMuse’s Glorious. Go!

We've got good friends to the left of us

And good friends to our right

Got the open sky above us

And the earth beneath our feet

Never fear-the birds are singin'

Even endings can be sweet

Oh, what a day!

Never fear--the birds are singin'

Even endings can be sweet

Oh, what a day!

Love you so,

Molly