I once heard someone say “god is the blanket that we throw over the mystery of the universe” and that really stuck. Yes, we don’t, we can’t, understand the universe, but we need some way to process it, some way to deal with the uncontrollable nature of it, and so we call it ‘god’.

I read a book on happiness once that told a story about a young couple who had lost a child. They were religious and took great comfort in the idea that this was “all a part of god’s plan”. I have very mixed feelings about that. We can examine the seeming cruelty of ‘god’ in that situation, but we can also appreciate that they found a way to come to grips with the lack of safety in the world, and the uncontrollable nature of our universe.

‘God’, or religion, really does give a lot of peace of mind to a lot of people in crisis. The concept is a hack for learning to "let go." But there are down sides. No one wants to be a passenger in car when the driver says “Jesus take the wheel!”

And this is just such a constant wrestling match in my head. How do you be a responsible person, how do you keep planning for the future while knowing, while holding the knowledge that you live in a universe without safety? A universe that you can’t control, where tragedy is always possible. How the fuck do you do that?!?!

I do have some idea. I know that planning is entirely necessary in this life, and so you gotta keep doing it. And also, you have to hold the reality that there is some percentage, some amount of the situation that is, from our perspective, totally random and uncontrollable. I am now capable of intellectually acknowledging that, and I’ve been learning to decouple tragedy with shame or guilt, or even failure, in my thought processes. But I haven’t found a way to emotionally hold this reality.

Ideas?