From the beginning of time, people have searched for happiness, connection, and relief from sorrow. We read countless books, follow wisdom traditions, and look to religion and psychology for answers. Yet despite all our progress in knowledge, the same questions remain: How can we find lasting happiness? How do we keep it from slipping away? What is the point?
In my own journey, I spent years believing that others had life figured out and I was somehow missing something essential. It turned out I was wrong, and many are as a confused as I was. We resemble each other in that we measure ourselves by stories we are told and those we tell. We create narrative threads that connect disparate events into one story, a story of work, of love, of families, of achievements and failures, of gains and losses. Yet beneath our stories resides a quiet unease, a sense that meaning keeps receding just beyond our reach.
Nature offers a different way of knowing. She does not hurry, explain, or console — yet everything unfolds as it must. The tide moves in and out; trees lose their leaves and bloom again; July in the Northeast brings a symphony of crickets. All around us life that has nothing to do with our stories unfolds, and these events happen whether we are aware of them or not. We may check the weather report in the morning to know what to wear but forget nature’s great power to bring prosperity or its opposite. Despite our extensive knowledge, this is a power which we have not managed to control, and when we try –we succeed only in making things worse; nature is presently rebalancing, adjusting to new conditions, bringing fires and floods, upending even the best lived of lives.
In nature’s rhythms, and unpredictability, in its benevolence, indifference and fierceness, we are reminded that life exists beyond our personal drama. The pulse of the natural world continues, steady and indifferent, yet profoundly alive.
When we forget this connection, we fall into disappointment — believing that life has failed us when it does not deliver what we expect. But life is not meant to conform to our plans; it simply moves through its own cycles of growth and loss, and although we may feel separated from it, we are actually a part of it, subject to its impact and to our own cycles of growth and decay.
Our suffering often comes not from what happens, but from insisting that what happens should be otherwise.
In truth, we are not separate from nature. We are part of its endless movement, the rising and falling, the abundance and the drought. When we align ourselves with this reality, we find a gentler kind of peace. We stop demanding that life reward our efforts, and begin to see ourselves as woven into a larger fabric — one that includes storm and sunlight, joy and grief, creation and decay.
Connection arises not from control, but from acceptance of our noble and humble place in creation. If we can attain inner peace, a worthy and difficult goal, we can connect to our birthright, to the greater reality, where meaning resides. When we walk among the trees, listen to the wind, or watch a small creature go about its life, something within us remembers our place. For a moment, we are no longer striving, only belonging — part of the same great unfolding that sustains all things.
Sometimes we lose what is precious to us, what it took decades to build, what we created out of love and will. Perhaps we despair and long to end our suffering. But if we can become still, we may discover that we have a life force and that this life force is seemingly independent of our emotions and our expectations. To our surprise, even during periods of devastating loss, the life force can remain vibrant and strong, unaffected by our suffering, pulsing us toward renewal and resilience —in TS Eliot’s words “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.
©2025 Shulamit Elson