Imagine

I don’t know where to go next. It’s a hollow kind of hush — not bad, exactly, just empty in the way an unused room smells late in the afternoon. There’s a particular scent I can always name: the dry paper of hymnals at the church, the whisper of old textbooks stacked in the back of a classroom before the students arrive, the thin, bitter ghost of coffee that has settled into the woodwork over years. When I was small I would pry open a hymnal at the binding and breathe — the concentrated smell lived right in that spine, as if meaning itself had been sewn into the pages.
Right now, that library-room smell lives in me. It is a quietness that asks whether I am between chapters, or whether I have simply paused in the middle of one.
I’ve been thinking about why we insist everything must mean something. We’re a species addicted to patterns: to stories that map the raw and the random into tidy plots. It’s a humane instinct; stories stitch the small, cold surprises of life into a blanket we can carry. But the urge to name — to declare the unexplainable a moral, a plan, a divine hand — can also be a kind of cage.
I’m not interested in settling the theological debate here. I don’t believe in a white-bearded deity orchestrating fates — not because I want to offend, but because the world is too full of small cruelties to make that narrative comfortable (pediatric cancer and political harms are hard to reconcile with the idea of a comfortably benevolent puppeteer). At the same time, I don’t want to mock the solace that other people find in belief. Solace is real, and kindness requires we honor it.
There’s an episode that returns to me often: my former mother-in-law, a woman of fierce conviction, told me once that Jesus had sat beside her in a pickup truck in rural Wisconsin. She described the encounter like a witness giving evidence — earnest, certain. I asked questions, perhaps too many. Did she see him plainly? Did she touch him? How did he leave? Those questions made the experience into something tangible, interrogable; they also revealed the friction between our ways of knowing.
Her conviction shaped how she saw me: not as a neighbor on a shared road, but as a soul to be guided, which led to judgments that ultimately fractured family ties. I tried to respond with patience, with curiosity, with honesty — but there were limits to “live and let live” when the other party saw belief as a mandate rather than a private refuge.
Neal deGrasse Tyson once said, “God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.” I like that line because it offers a generous alternative to certainty: not a sneer, but an invitation to wonder. When the map runs out and the territory begins, we can say, “I don’t know,” and that need not be the end of courage. It can be the beginning of a better question.
Living here in the Pacific Northwest — where cedar and salt and rain are as constant as breath — has taught me another relationship to the unknown. The geese fly their neatly imperfect V across the grey water and are not concerned with whether anyone is watching. The tide comes and goes without explanation, and yet the shoreline is always rearranged into new, quieter patterns. There is a humility in that: not resignation, but an ongoing practice of attention.
For me, life is less about resolving mysteries than it is about learning how to sit with them with curiosity and care. It is for noticing — the way a rain-slicked maple leans toward the sun that peeks out for five minutes, the way a student’s small victory arrives like a sudden bevel of light. It is for tending — relationships that require the hard labor of listening, for the craft of making things (a script, a page, a classroom routine) that outlasts our certainties. It is for choosing how to be in the world when someone else’s truth collides with ours: not to shame, not to convert, but to witness.
So when I say I don’t know where to go next, I am not panicked. I am in that room with the old paper and the thin coffee film, breathing the familiar, uncomfortable scent, and allowing it to remind me of simpler commitments: curiosity, stewardship, and small acts of kindness. If there is any meaning I can lay claim to, it is this — to keep looking, to keep asking the better questions, and to keep showing up for the little, wild, ordinary parts of life that teach me how to be human.