Sometimes we look around and feel that everything is going wrong.

Families are changing. Relationships are changing. Children make choices their parents never imagined. Things that once seemed unquestionable are being questioned. People disappoint us. Good people suffer. Life does not always follow the picture we had created for it.

And somewhere inside us comes the thought, This is not how it was supposed to be.

But how do we really know how it was supposed to be?

We See Only a Small Part

There is an intelligence operating in this universe – vast, endless, and far beyond what our individual minds can comprehend. The same intelligence operates through nature, through change, through creation and destruction, through what we understand and what we don’t.

Guruji often reminds us that everything is unfolding according to a larger divine plan – that at the level of the whole, everything is going as it should.

That can be difficult to accept when we are standing inside something painful or watching life move in a direction we never expected. We see one moment and call it wrong because we cannot see where it came from or where it is going. But the fact that we cannot understand the larger movement does not necessarily mean that the larger movement has gone wrong.

Yet we are trying to understand this enormous existence from within one human lifetime. We see what is happening today and judge it with what we know today. We know very little about everything that brought this moment into being, and even less about what may come from it.

It is easy for a parent to worry when their grown child takes a different road in life. It can feel like a mistake, but it’s only one chapter of their life. Ten or twenty years down the line, they both might see it as the right turn. From where they stand today, neither of them knows how the story turns out.

And isn’t that true of so much of life? We see something breaking, but we don’t yet know what that breaking may eventually open.

We Are Not Looking With Completely Clear Eyes Either

Our view is limited not only because we cannot see very far ahead. We are also looking at life through our own fears, expectations, attachments and aversions.

Without even realizing it, we create pictures of how life should be. We imagine a certain future for our children and expect relationships to unfold in particular ways. We form ideas about success, family, love, respect, happiness and perfection, even about what should happen at different stages of life.

Then life moves differently, and we call it wrong.

Sometimes it truly is wrong. But sometimes what we are calling wrong simply means, This is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted. This is not the life I had pictured.

That difference is worth looking at.

We are living inside our fears, expectations, ideas of perfection and imperfection, needs, attachments and aversions – and from inside all of that, we are trying to decide whether this endless existence is going right or wrong.

This Does Not Mean Everything That Happens Is Right

There is an important distinction here.

Trusting that there is a larger intelligence operating in existence does not mean that every human action is right. People hurt one another. Injustice exists. Sometimes terrible things happen to very good people. None of this needs to be called good simply because we believe there is something larger than what we can see.

We still respond to life as human beings. If someone needs protection, something in us may rise to protect them. We help where we can, correct what we can and work to change what we believe is wrong. That response in us is not outside the unfolding of life. It is part of it too.

And sometimes we don’t respond the way we wish we had. Fear stops us or confusion takes over, and only much later do we understand what we could have done differently. That doesn’t have to become a lifelong judgment against ourselves.

The person who could not speak yesterday may find a voice tomorrow. Someone who once judged easily may go through an experience that changes the way they see another person’s struggle. What we cannot understand today may become the very thing that changes us years from now.

We are not finished human beings.

We Rarely Know What an Experience Is Doing to Us

When we look back at our lives, some of the experiences that changed us most deeply were probably not experiences we would have willingly chosen.

A single conversation can change a relationship. A message can arrive and suddenly the future we imagined looks different. Something we worked toward for years may not happen, or someone we thought would always remain in our life may walk in another direction.

At that moment, we don’t experience any of this as wisdom. We experience disappointment, anger, fear, helplessness or grief.

Only later do we sometimes realize that the experience changed more than our circumstances. It changed something in us.

We may become less judgmental. Something we had been holding onto may lose its power over us. An expectation we carried for years may finally break. We may discover strength we didn’t know we had, or understand another person’s pain in a way we could not have understood before.

Not every painful experience needs a beautiful explanation. Sometimes we simply don’t know why something happened. But we also don’t know what it may eventually do within us.

Life May Be Removing More Than We Realize

Throughout life, we collect so many ideas about ourselves and the world. We become a child, a parent, a partner, a professional, an achiever, a protector. We carry our successes and failures, and along with all these identities come expectations about how we should be treated, what we deserve and what our life should look like.

We hold these ideas so closely that eventually they begin to feel like us.

Then life touches them.

A relationship changes, a role disappears, or someone stops needing us in the way they once did. Something we were proud of may lose its importance. Even an opinion we defended for years may no longer feel completely true. Slowly, sometimes painfully, another layer falls.

Perhaps life is not only changing what is happening around us. Perhaps it is also shedding some of the concepts, identities, attachments and certainties that prevent us from seeing ourselves more clearly.

Not because those things were necessarily bad. They may simply have served their time.

Perhaps Trust Begins With “I Don’t Know”

Trust does not have to mean convincing ourselves that everything happening is good.

Maybe trust is much simpler than that.

I don’t know.

I don’t know why this happened or where another person’s journey will lead. I cannot know what today’s disappointment will mean ten years from now, or why one door opened while another remained closed despite everything I did.

And strangely, there can be relief in admitting that.

Because now I no longer have to explain the entire universe from the tiny place where I happen to be standing today.

I can disagree with what happened and still accept that it happened. I can try to change something without hating life for being what it is at this moment. I can grieve without deciding that existence has abandoned me, and I can question what I don’t understand without needing an immediate answer.

Maybe we were never meant to understand an endless existence from within the boundaries of one small lifetime.

And Slowly, the Questions Change

For much of our lives, our questions naturally point outward. Why did this happen to me? Why did that person behave this way? Why didn’t I get what I wanted? Why isn’t life going according to plan?

But after life challenges enough of our expectations, another kind of question can begin to appear. Why does this have so much power over my peace? What exactly am I afraid of losing? Is all of my pain coming from what happened, or is some of it coming from the picture I had created of how things were supposed to be?

The questions are no longer only about what life is doing.

Slowly, they begin to turn toward the one experiencing it.

And Then, Who Am I?

Over a lifetime, we gather so much into what we call me – our roles, relationships, achievements and failures, beliefs, memories, possessions, fears and dreams for the future. We say my family, my career, my beliefs, my success, my pain, my expectations, my life.

But life keeps changing all of them. Relationships change. The body changes. Roles, beliefs, desires and fears change. Even the person I thought I was ten years ago is not exactly the person I am today.

And when we begin to see that, perhaps a deeper question naturally arises: What is it that I have been calling “I”?

Eventually, the question becomes even simpler.

Who am I?

Maybe this is one of the most precious questions life can bring us to – a question we may never have asked while everything was going exactly according to plan.

I don’t know whether we can ever see the whole picture from within one human lifetime. Perhaps we cannot. But when life looks terribly wrong, maybe we can leave a little room for the possibility that what we see today is not the whole story.

We can still care deeply, protect what needs protecting, correct what we can and grieve when something hurts. Trust does not require us to become passive, call suffering good or pretend that painful things don’t hurt. Our desire to help, protect and change what we believe is wrong is also part of this unfolding.

Perhaps we can simply leave a little space for what we do not yet understand.

Not because we know what this vast intelligence is doing. We don’t.

But perhaps trust begins exactly there – in knowing that we do not have to see the entire plan to trust that there is one.

We may see something breaking and call it wrong. We may resist it, question it, grieve it or try to change it. All of that is part of being human, and perhaps all of that too has its place in the larger unfolding.

And still, somewhere beneath all of it, there can be a deeper trust: I am seeing only this moment. What is unfolding is far greater than what I can see.

Perhaps everything is not going wrong after all.

Perhaps, within a picture far greater than the one we can see, everything is going exactly as it should.