When the world stops making sense

There are moments in life when our world seems to break. The sudden loss of a loved one; the unexpected sharp turn of fortune; the end of a relationship. These moments can rearrange everything you thought you knew about how the world worked and your place within it. Everyone experiences this sooner or later—some, it seems, more often than others.

For me, it was the loss of my father nearly two decades ago. Later, more recently, it happened when my heart gave out and I received a transplant. What strikes me now, looking back, is how quickly everything unraveled around me and how long-lasting the damage can be as it clings to the soul. In the case of my father’s passing, I held on to that pain for many years. In fact, just a few months ago I allowed the grief of years to finally wash over me as I sat for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services for the first time, with friends. Fifty-six years old, and I broke down and cried my heart out during Yizkor.

When the world stops making sense, we reach for meaning. Why did this happen? What is this trying to teach me? What does this mean for my life? It’s natural—automatic, even. But I’ve come to believe that our search for meaning in the immediate wake of trauma does more to obscure reality than illuminate it.

Meaning is not always discovery; much of the time, it’s projection.

When something wounds us deeply, we rush to interpret it, to press it into a shape that feels rational because the alternative—the raw, unvarnished truth—is simply too much to bear. We impose stories and order; categorize, label, sort, and theorize. We fold the event into a narrative, often the one we already carry with us. And in doing so, we stop seeing what is right in front of us: the tinted lens transmutes the landscape.

In the early days of my transplant, people would tell me things like, “There’s a reason for this,” or “G-d must have plans for you,” or “You’re just not done here yet.” None of it resonated. I wasn’t looking for cosmic explanations or hunting for metaphors. I was moving minute by minute, hour by hour. Surviving. Breathing. Healing. Coming to terms with the reality and the suffering that came with it. Trauma did not provide me meaning—it handed me an unfiltered, unmapped reality, and I was overwhelmed.

The truth is that trauma carries no inherent wisdom. It is not a teacher, nor is it a riddle to be solved or a parable waiting to be decoded. It does not arrive with a moral attached; it simply arrives. Rush to declare its purpose and you distort it—the opposite of what we must do to make our way through the experience itself.

There is a discipline in simply seeing—without forcing a lesson or retrofitting the event into a comfortable narrative. This kind of seeing is steady, patient, and unflinching. It asks nothing more of the moment than honesty. No metaphors, no spiritual gloss, no heroic arc. To see the experience for what it is, just as it is—the plain truth of it—is often far more healing than any comforting story we might concoct.

Does this lessen the pain? Of course not. Grief, loss, betrayal—suffering in all forms—does not fade simply because we acknowledge it. But acceptance of reality is the beginning of healing. Revelation is not bolted to the trauma itself; it comes later, cultivated by the person who lives through it. It grows out of how we choose to move forward, rebuild, and carry ourselves when the world has taken more than we thought we could endure.

Seeing the trauma clearly and accepting it for what it is may begin the healing process, but it is far from the end of the story. Think of it as the clearing of a field, the readying of soil for what comes next. Once we stop explaining our grief—or suppressing it—we are finally able to feel it.

This is where the soul begins to slowly mend.

Grief has its own life within us. It moves with ebb and tide, sometimes softening, then returning in a crashing wave that overwhelms without warning. It pushes us toward becoming someone new, though we may resist—clinging to old meaning, old identity, the person we were before the event rather than the person shaped by surviving it.

When the world stops making sense, the temptation is to rebuild the old story as quickly as possible. It’s familiar—comfortable. We may try to pretend nothing has changed, but something has changed. Something always changes.

And this is where the work lies. We have to step back from our instinct to restore the old order. We have to allow the grief to move through us without rushing to tame it. We must look less at where we’ve been and more at what now lies ahead.

Slowly—almost imperceptibly—a sense of calm settles over the soul. Not cosmic purpose or moral clarity, but a quiet stillness reserved for those who have lived through something unchosen yet unavoidable. Meaning, if it comes at all, comes from who we become—not from what happened to us.

And perhaps this is the deeper truth: we do not regain our footing by inventing explanations or powering through. We regain it by facing this new world as it is—broken, beautiful, indifferent, astonishing, painful, joyous—and allowing ourselves to live honestly within it.

Healing does not change us; it is the trauma itself, and the long stretch that follows in its shadow, that crumbles the world around us. Healing is the work of putting ourselves back together in a way that fits the world as it has become, not as it once was. It is the slow, often painful, reconciliation of who we were, what the moment requires of us, and who we are to become. We cannot return to the old story; we learn how to inhabit this new terrain with steadiness, honesty, and a quiet refusal to pretend the break never happened. And in that patient reconstruction, meaning does not need to be invented—it takes shape on its own.