After the Storm (and why I still don’t have answers)

Indulge me while I wax a bit philosophical this week…

Last month, I found myself standing in my kitchen, staring at my cold brew coffee as if it might explain the last six months of my life. Khema, my ever-patient companion, sat at my feet, tail thumping, eyes fixed on me with that canine blend of hope and skepticism. Outside, where the two of us had just been, the grass was still slick from the night’s rain, the kind of storm that rattles the windows.

I’d just come through a personal storm. Not the dramatic, movie-trailer kind, but the slow, grinding kind that leaves us changed in ways we can’t quite name. The kind where we wake up and aren’t sure who we are, or whether the storm is even over. I wish I could say I emerged with clarity, or at least a good story. Instead, I got coffee, a muddy dog, and a lingering sense of disorientation.

Haruki Murakami, my favorite novelist, writes in Kafka on the Shore:

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

I keep coming back to this passage, not because it offers comfort, but because it refuses to. Murakami doesn’t hand us a hero’s medal or a tidy lesson. He names the truth: storms – real ones, existential ones – don’t leave us with answers. They leave us altered, sometimes in ways we can’t articulate. The “me” who emerges is not the “me” who entered, and there’s no going back to the old coordinates.

As a psychologist and a secular Buddhist, I’ve spent years watching people try to narrate their way out of pain. Myself included. Somewhere in the worst of the last six months I caught myself drafting sentences about it. Not journaling – drafting. Arranging the thing into paragraphs while it was still happening, hunting for the turn, the place where it would start to mean something. Oh. This is the exact thing I teach about. Hello.

We want transformation to be a before-and-after photo, a clean arc from suffering to wisdom. We psychologists even have a name for the thing we’re hoping for: post-traumatic growth. The research is real, and it is also more complicated than the phrase makes it sound. When people report how much they’ve grown after a hard passage, their reports often don’t match what actually changed when you measure it directly. We are, it turns out, better at composing the story of our transformation than at undergoing it.

Here’s the misreading I see all the time – maybe you’ve felt it too. We expect that after the storm we’ll feel healed, whole, maybe even grateful for the ordeal. We want the suffering to justify itself with a shiny new self on the other side.

That’s not how it works, at least not in my experience. More often we come out blinking in the sunlight, unsure if it’s over, unsure who we are now. The old certainties don’t fit and the new ones haven’t arrived. We’re left with a kind of existential jet lag.

Murakami’s genius is that he doesn’t try to resolve this. He sits with the unknowing, the instability of identity, the bittersweetness of change. This is where he and the Dharma meet. (Dharma being less a body of belief than a set of practical instructions for being alive.) Both refuse false closure. Both treat impermanence, anicca, not as a philosophical idea but as the ground we walk on, slippery and uneven.

There is a second thing they share. A brilliant young man noticed it about 2,600 years and gave it a name: anattā, non-self. Not a mystical claim. Just the observation that there is no fixed, permanent “me” underneath the weather, waiting to be restored once the wind dies down. The storm doesn’t destroy that self and it doesn’t repair it. It rearranges the furniture of our mind. Sometimes we find a new window. Sometimes we just trip over the ottoman in the dark.

Let me be careful about what I am not saying, because this is where a piece like this usually gets reduced to something useless. I am not saying the storm changed nothing, or that meaning is a con, or that we should stop trying to understand our own lives. That is a shrug dressed up as wisdom, and it’s cheap. The distinction I’m after is smaller and more useful: not knowing what the change means is not the same as no change having happened. Unresolved is not unmoved.

Which means the work isn’t to produce the meaning faster. It’s to stay in contact with what is actually here – the disorientation, the weak sunlight, the dog who needs a walk regardless – long enough for the change to show itself on its own schedule. That is slower and far less flattering than the before-and-after photo. It is also the only version I have ever seen hold up.

There’s a temptation, especially in spiritual circles, to bypass the void, to fill it with platitudes or silver linings. I’ve done it. Recently, as noted. But the real work, I think, is to meet the void honestly. To admit that existential loneliness is the common denominator, and that all our striving, our relationships, careers, and even our spiritual practice, is a response to that shared emptiness.

Murakami doesn’t flinch from this either. He writes characters who wander through liminal spaces, forests and dreams, never quite arriving. There is no promise of arrival, only the invitation to keep walking and keep noticing.

As someone who came late to intimate friendship, who left the certainties of a childhood faith for the open-endedness of the Dharma, I find this both unsettling and oddly comforting. I’m still working things out. I suspect I always will be, and I no longer have decades in which to do it.

So here is what I have to offer, which isn’t much. If you’re in the storm, or just out of it, or not sure where you are – welcome. You’re in good company. There’s no map, no guarantee of clarity, no final transformation that makes it all make sense. But we can notice the bittersweetness, hold two truths at once, and resist the urge to tidy up what won’t be tidied.

Sometime today, see if you can notice where the storm has left you. Not what you learned from it. Just how you’ve changed, subtly and strangely, maybe not yet in words you’d say out loud. And if you’re still in the thick of it, you are not alone.

I’ll be here, coffee in hand, dog at my feet, still figuring it out. Thank you for sitting with the unfinished version of this alongside me. It is easier to “not-know” with company.

Peace.

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Thank you, as always, for spending a little time here with me. The fact that you read, and reflect, and occasionally write to tell me something landed – it matters more than you know. It is why I do this.

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With gratitude,

Jeff

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Jeffrey C. Fracher, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and university professor who has been studying and practicing Buddhism since 1990. In 2013, he completed training to become a Buddhist teacher. He is the author of Practical Dharma and More Practical Dharma, with his third book, The Secular Path to Well-Being, now released. Practical Dharma draws on the ancient teachings of Buddhism combined with evidence-based modern psychology to reduce suffering in the areas of life where it most commonly occurs – no Buddhist membership required.