Learning to trust in the absence of evidence

For years, I have been entrenched in the predictability of science.

There was a time when beauty, wonder, and imagination coexisted with the infinite possibility of knowledge. Research and discovery gelled perfectly in truth with an unspoken ease.

I couldn’t explain it, and I didn’t have to.

It just was.

Little by little, it wasn’t.

One day I woke up and I could no longer reconcile my creativity with the draw of science. Suddenly they were separate, different, even incompatible.

When did I lose the trust in the synergy? I don’t remember…

I was awash in the labs, the facts, the ancient science, the entropy proofs, and equilibrium. This became my worldview, my reality.

I fell deeper in the rabbit hole in pharmacy school. I learned about critical analysis and the evidence pyramid, striving always, always, always to find “gold-standard” proof, or the next best thing.

At some point, so entrenched in the known, I was hardly aware of what I had lost. I was lost in the churn: research, rationale, repeat.

Where was the wonder in all this? Where was the proof of joy? I surely had joy in my life, but how could it be proved in this way?

The wheel kept turning: research, rationale, repeat. Everything had evidence, every judgment based in reason.

In retrospect, fucking exhausting.

Years later, burnt out, trying to recover from years of stress and fatigue, I sought “alternate” forms of healing, in quotes for the benefit of my insecurities in my profession.

I can’t tell you what drew me to a modality that I couldn’t rightly search for in Pubmed, but I found myself face-to-face with an energy healer and angel reader.

I felt I couldn’t show her my science side. She would know how I discredited these things in the past, she’d know, and she’d judge me, she’d withhold her gifts, or kick me out. The thoughts and hits kept coming.

I sat there afraid and confused in this inner conflict, wanting so badly to trust her and remain open to it. My mind kept coming up with reasons to reject it all.

As if by intuition (imagine that!) my body stayed sat in that chair, and forced out the words to show my resistance, my judgment.

She made it ok to be in this turmoil, wanting so badly to have faith and trust, but being so used to needing to know.

And then she cracked me open.

With gentleness and love, and even some evidence, she showed me that trust and skepticism are not oil and water.

The inexplicable in this world is not something to shun or fear. Absence of evidence is not evidence.

There is a reality in which these opposing worlds coexist, not just peacefully, but synchronously and joyously.

It’s not even a matter of two worlds — they are one and the same.

I kept thinking, “Is this really possible? Can I have both?” I honestly think I was vibrating, shaking from the power of it.

Walking away with new vocabulary and a million-and-one questions, I was slightly overwhelmed, but was just raw enough to carry on my own experiments and gather my own data.

Did I worry about falling in the trap of sudden interruptions and demands for proof, for evidence? I did…and yet…

I left knowing that I could move forward and did not have to answer to the “higher power” of the evidence pyramid, at least not in my heart.

I took those first few steps with a crystal in my pocket, and I haven’t looked back.