Why Is My Life Like This?

There is no reason so let’s stop looking for one

The search can be endless. (Photo by author)

In my mid-40s, when I was still single after many years of being single; when I continued to hold a Never Married status in a society where people pair up and marry, I often turned to the big scratchy question of Why?

Why was I single? Was I not circulating enough? Was it something I did or didn’t do? Something in my psychology? My choices? Was it carelessness, like the person who didn’t hear the music stop during a game of musical chairs, and found herself the last person standing — no chair?

Finally, after turning over endless rocks, talking to my Wise Woman/therapist, boring my friends, scribbling away in notebooks, walking my neighborhood, and musing over my life (and enjoying a lot of my solo years too), I came to this conclusion:

There was no reason.

People marry, people stay single, and in the end, we’ll never know how to make sense of any of it, because life isn’t to be made sense of. There is no making sense of life — and that’s its beauty. The wonder of life being lived through each person is mysterious, magical, and unpredictable.

Let’s face it: We love to analyze our own lives, other people’s lives — friends, family members, celebrities (people we’ve never met!) — as though we can…