I Don’t Understand

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Every morning, or at least on those mornings when I log onto my blog, WordPress poses a question as a thought-starter.

Normally, I breeze over the question as I usually have a general sense of what I want to write about when I sit down. But, this morning, the question captured my attention. “What’s something most people don’t understand?”

I read through some of the answers and was fascinated by how differing all the opinions were.

  • other people
  • themselves
  • how important it is to take care of yourself
  • narcissists
  • living with chronic pain
  • that we are all gods
  • how to make money
  • how to be present
  • and the list goes on…

I don’t know what most people don’t understand – for me, there are a lot of things I don’t understand…

I don’t understand how we can continue to kill and maim and hurt one another. I don’t understand how we can be so cruel to animals. How we can abuse children. How we can say, I love you, and then destroy that love through so many different ways.

I don’t understand how the earth keeps spinning in its orbit and how the moon appears every night even when we keep doing things to block the light and turn our world upside down..

I don’t understand (at least not completely) how my heart skips a beat when I see the faces of my grandchildren or hear their voices, or how my heart can keep expanding to love my family more and more.

I don’t understand how love’s limitless presence can lift some people up and scare others into staying down.

And I don’t understand how much there is to understand, about the darkness and the light, the ups and the downs, the ins and the outs, the sensical and non-sensical, the beautiful and the ugly, the mystery and the horrors of life on this one planet we call our home. This one planet that is the foundation and the source of everything. The breath we take. The food we eat. The gravity that holds us in place. The far horizons that call us to dream.

There is so much mystery, wonder and awe in this world. I do not understand.why we keep trying to destroy it and one another.

And then, I come full circle. Life isn’t about what I don’t understand. It’s about understanding that my role in it is to understand how vital, connected and beautiful my role is and to share the beauty and the light of me so that however I play out this life, it creates better, does no harm, brings joy and deepens Love always and in all ways.

What about you? Where does what you don’t you understand lead you?

17 thoughts on “I Don’t Understand”

  1. Elgie,

    Much like my hero Viktor Frankl, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ comes to mind. But, much like peasants in warm countries, I want a shirt, a pair of pants, a pair of shoes, rice in my bowl … and fingers on my keyboard! … Everything else is a bonus.

    When we write our way down a rabbit hole, we’ll find rabbits; when we write our way through a donut hole, we find donuts, and now astronomers have found a bigger (a billion times the size of our sun) black hole, so I guess we’ll all be doomed in a few billion years – or next year.

    In the end, what we do and what we seek only matters to us and those around us for 100 years, and then it’s dust to dust.

    Do what you want most and ignore anyone who says you are wrong.

    Mark

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. Strange – that was not the prompt question I saw today. Mine was “when you were five what did you want to be when you grew up”. As to what I don’t understand — why has it become she passed. No she died. She didn’t pass into something else or somewhere else. Also why don’t people understand how to zipper merge. Random I know! Bernie

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Ahhh…. that was because I wrote it the day before and forgot to fix it before I posted. 🙂

      I think the word ‘died’ scares many people and so, we talk around it without having to look at it’s totality.

      and lol re ‘zipper’ — just yesterday I had that happen and almost said those words outloud to myself in the car! 🙂

      Like

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  5. There is so much that I don’t understand, there is so much I want to understand. Yet i do understand that this is a very natural progression of life, of human evolution. If I were to cease wanting to understand what is going on around me, in the country, the world, I would be nothing. There would be no reason for me to continue in my quest for knowledge, for new interests, for different places to explore, new cuisines to try. In my seventh decade I should be comfortable, content that I have accomplished so much. That much I understand.
    What I do not understand is why others insist on fighting, for trying to conquer nations for no reason other than misconceived illusions of grandeur. I don’t understand why we can send a man to walk on the moon but millions died because the world cannot find a fix for the recent “pandemic pandemonium”. I don’t understand how some of our neighbours to the south are enamoured with a self-styled cult caricature when WW II proved such a tactic to be disastrous. I don’t understand human greed, betrayal of trust, lack of compassion. Yet, when a stranger smiles, says hello as I briskly walk by on my daily route march, I smile back and wish them a nice day. That I understand. Life is grand!

    Liked by 1 person

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  6. Most people don’t understand how fast life goes until they start seeing it in the rear view mirror.
    And I don’t understand math word problems or math problems that involve any part of the alphabet.
    How does one know they don’t understand something if they think they do?

    My daughter taught me that rule number one is … people are dumb. I tend to agree.
    No matter how smart that we think we are.
    And it answers many questions.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Oh Nance! So true – I volunteered at an event on the weekend which meant I worked from 11 pm to 4am — I like to pretend age doesn’t impact me. 🙂 lol – I do understand why I don’t! 🙂

      There is that point about people – we are all blind to what we do not want to know or understand.

      Hugs

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