But Why Did This Have to Happen?
On our search for meaning, the need to know, and what happens while we're waiting for answers
There is a question I hear often in my work. It usually comes when something hurts.
An animal is young and chronically ill. A foster finally finds a home, only to be returned. Something happens that seems unfair or makes no sense at all.
And somewhere in the middle of trying to understand what is happening, the question comes.
Why?
Why did this have to happen?
What am I supposed to learn from this?
What is our soul contract?
What is my animal here to teach me?
I understand the question because I have asked it too.
When something hurts badly enough, we want there to be a reason for it. We want to know what we are supposed to take from it, what we could have done differently, what we can do differently next time. We want to make sense of the thing that does not make sense. And maybe that is partly because if we can understand why something happened, we can convince ourselves we will know how to keep it from happening again.
There is comfort in believing there is an answer. There is control in it, too. And surrendering to the possibility that we may not get one can be terrifying.
I have spent a lot of time asking why since Loki died.
Why did my six-year-old dog die?
Why did it happen so fast?
Why could a team of veterinarians not figure out what caused the sepsis?
Why couldn’t I?
How could I spend so much of my life listening to animals and still not know this?
I don’t find myself living in those questions anymore. But sometimes I go there.
And when I do, I understand the people who sit across from me asking what their animal’s illness or death is supposed to teach them. They are not really looking for a lesson. They are hurting. They want to know that what they and their animal are going through is not for nothing.
I understand that.
What I have a much harder time with are the answers we sometimes rush in to give them. Maybe it was part of his soul contract. Maybe he agreed to this before he came here. Maybe he is needed for something bigger on the other side.
Maybe.
I do not know.
And I have become increasingly comfortable saying that.
Because when someone is standing in the wreckage of something they love, I am not sure that putting a spiritual explanation on top of their pain makes the pain any easier to carry. Sometimes it just gives us somewhere else to hide from the fact that we do not know.
I do believe our experiences change us. I believe there is meaning in the relationships we have with our animals, and that they can alter the course of our lives in ways we do not recognize until years later.
But I am not sure meaning is always something we can extract while we are still living through the experience. Sometimes we are so desperate to get to the lesson that we try to skip the part where we actually live it. We want the ending while we are still somewhere in the middle.
Tell me what this means.
Tell me where this is going.
Tell me what I am supposed to learn.
Tell me why.
But what if we do not know yet?
What if we are not supposed to?
When Arya jumped that fence years ago and disappeared into the woods, I thought I knew what I was watching - my dog discovering freedom.
It took years for me to understand that moment differently. I could not have stood there that day and told you what Arya would eventually come to represent in my life. I did not know I had become disconnected from something. I did not know I was being invited back into relationship with the natural world, or with a part of myself I had forgotten.
I was just standing in a pasture watching my dog run.
And then I followed her.
Not just across the field, but into a different way of living. Into a life that became less about control and more about attention. Less about managing outcomes and more about being in relationship with what is actually here. A life that asked me to stay present long enough to notice what I would have otherwise missed.
The meaning came later, not because I finally solved it, but because I lived long enough for the experience to become part of something larger. And had I been given the ending that day, I am not sure it would have meant anything to me anyway.
I had not lived the middle yet.
I wonder how often we do this. How often we stand inside something that is still unfolding and demand that it explain itself.
We do it with illness. With loss. With relationships. With the paths that lead somewhere completely different from where we thought we were going.
We want to know what it was all for before we have even finished becoming the person who will one day look back on it. But I think there is something else underneath that urgency, too.
Sometimes we are not only trying to understand what is happening. We are trying to get out of it.
We want to get ahead of the uncertainty. Past the fear. Through the grief. We want to find the lesson, make sense of what happened, and arrive safely on the other side where we can look back and understand what it was all for.
I understand that impulse. Some experiences hurt so much that of course we want to know where the exit is.
But there are parts of our lives we cannot understand without first allowing ourselves to live them.
To feel what hurts while it hurts. To notice what changes. To let ourselves be uncertain. To discover what stays with us and what falls away. To become someone we could not have known how to become from the beginning.
The middle is not simply the distance between what happened and the moment we finally understand it.
The middle is where our lives are happening.
And if we are always trying to get through it, get beyond it, or turn it into something we can explain, we can miss the very experience we are asking to understand.
Maybe there is a lesson. Maybe there are a hundred small ones. Maybe the thing we thought was the lesson turns out, years from now, to have been only one small part of it. And maybe some experiences will never give us an explanation that feels big enough to justify what they cost.
That does not make them meaningless.
It makes them part of being alive.
I cannot always tell someone why something is happening to them.
There are many ways I receive information in my work. I can listen to your animal. I can share what comes through. I can help you see something you may not have been able to see from where you are standing. I can ask questions, offer guidance, and walk alongside you as you find your way through it.
But not everything is given to us.
And I do not think I am supposed to hand you the meaning of your own life.
That belongs to you.
We are each our own compass. Sometimes we need someone beside us to help us find our bearings, but ultimately, we are the ones who have to walk our own path.
And sometimes the only thing we can do is stay where our feet are long enough to live what is actually happening. Not rush toward the explanation. Not turn every painful thing into a lesson before we have even had the chance to feel it. Not demand an ending from something that is still becoming.
Maybe the lesson is not waiting for us at the end at all. Maybe some of it is here, in the not knowing, in the living, in the loving, in the ordinary days we would rush straight past if someone simply handed us the answer.
I still do not know why Loki died at six years old.
Maybe someday I will understand something about his death that I cannot understand from where I am now. Maybe I will not.
For now, I surrender to the not knowing.
Loki died. I lost him. There was pain and suffering, and knowing exactly why it happened would not change any of those things. An answer would not give him his life back. It would not make me miss him less.
So I cannot spend my time desperately trying to make sense of something that may never make sense to me.
That does not mean I stop asking why. Sometimes I still do. It does not mean I stop grieving him or wishing with everything in me that what happened had been different.
It simply means I can allow the questions to remain unanswered.
I can miss him.
I can grieve him.
I can love him.
And I can let not knowing be part of this, too.