The year was 1993. The circumstance was another setback amid the litany of wrist injuries that marked that period of my life. I remember sitting in the fairly dingy room in my fairly dingy apartment and thinking “this must be a sign.“

That thought, however, was immediately followed by a more complicated thought, namely, “a sign of what?“ This was an inadvertent paradigm shift, as I realized, never by that point in my life having read a self-help book or anything of the sort, that it was up to me to decide how I was going to interpret this so-called sign. Was it a sign that I needed to prove my devotion to the music by rolling up my sleeves and enduring with that much more tenacity? Or was it a sign that this whole operation was futile and that if I failed to heed the universe in that way, the obstacles would just become increasingly onerous?

While I was already by that point in my life prone to philosophical flights of fancy, this was far from an abstract consideration. How I was going to frame this, and how I was going to surmise the universe’s path for me was going to ultimately be a determining factor in my path forward. This was true on the very concrete level of whether I would continue working towards a music degree and a career in the art form or bail while I had a chance and study something else entirely. It also had the more secondary impact of informing how I would approach whichever pursuit I chose. I already knew by that point that simply declining to drop out of music school was not in itself a full hearted commitment to recovering physically and continuing to grow musically if I was moving forward with fear or ambivalence.

To this day, I am not entirely sure if the universe actually did have a message for me, and if so, what it was. I am, however, sure that my choice to treat it as a call to put on my gladiator’s uniform and fight back was central to the life that I have now. Not just because I am blessed to have a career in the art form that I fell in love with, but because the experience of leaning into that challenge helped find me in the same way that other subsequent choices to let go of pursuits less central to my soul helped sharpen my sense of priorities. I believed in signs from the universe then and I suppose I still do, but through that experience I developed an inexorably connected sense of my unavoidable responsibility to decode said signs in the manner that best contributes to my forward motion towards becoming the person I aspire to be and constructing the life I hope to manifest.

For those still reading, this would be an opportune moment to acknowledge that this is EDS Awareness Month. And if you have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or someone you care about does (and quite possibly even if not), it is likely you are familiar with the ways an injury or other unwelcome event, especially when repeated or compounded, can lead us to ask “what is the universe trying to tell me?” While it may on a hyper/rational level, be absurd to think that whatever suffering we are experiencing has anything to do with a cosmic master plan, it is possible to take that line of questioning and shift it from being a source of handwringing to a tool in meaning-making.

Before I go farther, I would like to distinguish what I’m talking about here from a few related but not identical phenomena. First is the notion that we shape our entire reality. I am neither speaking for nor against that particular idea, but I am conscious that it can be demeaning or offensive to those dealing with issues so extreme that it is unrealistic or even cruel to expect them to simply be OK by virtue of cultivating a positive attitude. Second is finding a loophole by which we can embrace magical or otherwise irrational thinking, like deciding that the stars have aligned in such a way that I clearly need to buy this sports car I’ve been coveting and clearly can’t afford. Finally, I also don’t want to conflate any of this with an oversimplified view of being a positive versus negative person, a Debbie Downer versus a Pollyanna, if you will. Choosing how we are going to frame the circumstances of our lives is a highly situational thing, where our inner resources, our outer resources, our core philosophies and values, and the unique circumstances facing us all intersect. Do I think that a “positive attitude“ is preferable to a negative one? I suppose so, but that is more a matter of personal, philosophical choice than it is a prescription meant to be one size fits all.

I and my family have been through a lot in recent months, most prominently a series of crises for our daughter Ariana, scary medical stuff at the forefront (I won’t claim that it’s easier to the patient than the worried loved one but wow is it interesting to navigate this from the other side). Much of the time I have been too consumed by the task(s) at hand for my framing to even be a consideration but then people ask how I’m doing and I feel a responsibility to give something resembling a coherent response. Or at least an intentional response, wanting to be as genuine as is reasonable while recognizing that how I frame things verbally, what I say first, what I choose to include or omit, and so on.

And so to do that I need a solid internal sense of the essence I am looking to convey, which in turn goes back to having a solid, internal sense of what I actually believe. The nuts and bolts are more straightforward, conveying that this medical procedure happened, and the result was this degree of success. But do I feel blessed or cursed or just mundanely slogging through the random circumstances in front of me? There are certainly elements of all of these, and yet I am choosing to lean into feeling blessed. I have been gifted with amazing and amazingly resilient kids. I have been gifted with love. I have been gifted with people willing to step up on my/our behalf. And I have been gifted with the inner fortitude to endure challenging circumstances, and to seek opportunities to further grow into that capacity.

Are these blessings objectively more significant to the reality of the situation than the suffering? Of course not, and I certainly wouldn’t presume suggest that the universe put my kid through the %+#&$ ringer to give me an opportunity for personal growth and embrace of community. And yet in the thick of it I noticed how my days went when I perceived I was being invited to love more deeply and feel grateful and relieved that worst case scenarios were averted versus how my days went when I perceived that the universe is gratuitously dumping on me. When I showed up at the hospital in the former headspace and heartspace, I found it a lot easier to be kind even when frustrated, to project calm even when scared, and to make lucid decisions even when punch-drunk from stress and sleep deprivation.

I’m amused (or, to be more accurate, choosing to be amused) by the timing of my writing this. My plan was to go to New York at the beginning of the month to hang out and go see some of my favorite living jazz musicians perform. I was going to write this on the train, using that time and space to jot down what seemed like a clear statement at the time. The night before this planned trip, I found myself in the emergency room, and the point when I was supposed to be on the train, I was instead being driven home in the aftermath of emergency eye surgery, while simultaneously wrapping my brain around the fresh and jarring news that my close friend Dawn had died over the weekend.

In the days that followed, my lucidity was fleeting, my energy was limited, and my capacity to read or write was virtually nonexistent, not conditions for drafting a profound essay that would illuminate all who came within 10 feet of it. What I did have was plenty of time to be still and for this principle of choosing my framing to take on yet another round of real world relevance. Was I cursed because my retina detached right before the last week of classes? Was I blessed because people were being generous and supportive in helping me navigate through it? Was I cursed because it’s already been a rough patch, and this was adding injury to insult which was already added to injury? Or was I blessed because the universe was doling out the adversity methodically and thus I was not experiencing this while in the worst of prior crises?

And this is all stuff that at least on paper is likely to get better. Dawn, of course, is not coming back, so there are all of the different angles of coping with loss. Gratitude to have had her in my life, heartbreak that she is no longer on this plane. Comfort in picturing her at peace, anger at any hardship she was forced to suffer. And more to the point in terms of the path forward, is this a sign that the universe wants me to be less open hearted towards others so I don’t get hurt like this or that I should lean harder into loving the important people in my life fiercely because finitude is simply the necessary cost of caring about a mortal being? Do I tune into the gift of experiencing her love, brilliance, and vitality for three decades or do I tune into the cruelty of a reality where such an enormous, radiant life force could snuff out just like that?

So how AM I framing up around all of these things? I prefer not to say. Not because it is particularly private (indeed anyone who knows me can likely make some pretty good educated guesses), but because it is not the point.

So, then, what IS the point? The point is the agency I have to allow myself to have a nuanced set of responses to life conditions and to let that evolve, both organically through the flow of emotions and through exercising agency in what I do with that. I am not going to claim that I have full agency over my emotions or framing surrounding recent events, nor would I even want to have that sort of rigid control over big feelings that in a sense have lives of their own. But I am very conscious that there are ways of processing that align closely to my values and to the possibility of suffering less both now and down the road, just as there are ways that will virtually guarantee that I descend into psychological rabbit holes that are neither helpful nor aligned with my values. In the end, however, philosophical all of this may be, it comes down to a very simple principle, which is that is given a choice between suffering more and suffering less, I prefer suffering less. And I mean this in the grander sense, which is to say, sometimes allowing grief or frustration to come out as needed may appear in the short run to be an increase in suffering, but allows for the release and healing that quells the overall suffering.

Yesterday I took a walk and decided to track the “signs” I was offered, starting with an affirmation of gratitude for even being able to take a walk in the first place, given both my recent mandate to avoid even that level of exercise for the first week-plus of healing and my daughter almost losing her leg so recently. Every few minutes there was something, whether a person waving or foliage blooming as I rounded a corner or a dog wagging its tail as I approached or a song playing from someone’s stereo as they drove by. The complexity remains, the pain remains, the grief remains, the inherent imperfection of even best-case-scenario human existence remains; none of this can be stifled or spin-doctored away. Yet signs of hope and connectedness and beauty were so abundant that I pretty quickly lost count. Is it contrived to view these as signs? Sure, in the same literal sense that exercising agency in choosing the words with which to express devotion to a loved one or remembering to savor an enriching experience are contrived. But as far as “contrivances” go, I’m fine with taking the invitation to feel the universe caring for me and illuminating a path by which things can be okay.