Part I: The Rush

There is a particular kind of urgency that arises when something doesn’t yet make sense. It’s subtle, often disguised as responsibility or maturity. We tell ourselves we should be able to explain what happened, what it means, how we feel about it, and what comes next. We rush to put it into words, as someone might rush to clean a spill—afraid that if we don’t contain it quickly, it will spread.

This rush is everywhere. It appears after a loss, when people ask how we’re doing, and we feel pressure to translate something wordless into a sentence that makes others comfortable. It shows up in illness, in creative work, in fractured relationships, in moments of profound change. The question isn’t always asked out loud, but it’s felt just the same: What is this? What does it mean? What should I take from it?

The Instinct to Explain

And so we explain.

We explain to reassure ourselves that we are still in control. We explain to signal that we’re okay, that we’re coping, and that we’ve already metabolized the experience and extracted something useful from it. We explain because not knowing can feel like failure in a culture that prizes clarity, certainty, and forward motion.

But there is a cost to explaining too soon.

When we rush to explain, we often flatten experiences that are still alive and moving within us. We turn something complex into something manageable. We summarize before the story has finished speaking. We translate pain, wonder, or confusion into something tidy—not because it’s true, but because it’s tolerable.

In storytelling, this impulse shows up as a premature resolution. The moral delivered too early. The meaning spelled out instead of allowed to emerge. In life, it shows up as platitudes we offer ourselves before we’re ready to believe them.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“At least something good came out of it.”

“I’ve made peace with it now.”

Why Not Knowing Feels Unsafe

Sometimes those statements are true…eventually. But timing matters. Meaning that arrives too early can feel like a betrayal of the experience itself.

The rush to explain is often rooted in discomfort with ambiguity. Ambiguity leaves us exposed. It asks us to stay present without answers. It requires us to admit, at least temporarily, that we don’t yet know what we think or feel. For many of us, that admission feels unsafe. We worry that if we don’t claim an interpretation quickly, someone else will assign one for us—or worse, that there will be no meaning at all.

Yet ambiguity is not emptiness. It is not absence. It is a space of unfolding.

In the conversations I’ve been having with writers and storytellers, this theme keeps surfacing: the discipline of restraint. The willingness to let a story breathe. The courage to leave something unresolved—not because it lacks depth, but because it has too much to be reduced to a single explanation. Again and again, the most resonant stories were not the ones that rushed to clarity, but the ones that trusted the reader to sit with uncertainty.

Life, it turns out, works the same way.

The Cost of Explaining Too Soon

There are experiences that ask to be witnessed before they are understood. There are seasons that are not meant to be explained while we are still inside them. When we rush to explain, we often skip the most important part: staying.

Staying with the discomfort.

Staying with the question.

Staying with the body’s response before the mind tries to organize it.

This doesn’t mean we never seek meaning. It means we respect the timing of meaning. We allow it to arrive rather than forcing it into existence.

The rush to explain can also be a form of self-protection. If we can explain something, we can distance ourselves from it. We can move it out of the realm of felt experience and into the safer territory of narrative. But some things resist that move. Some experiences insist on being felt longer than we’d like. They ask for presence, not interpretation.

What We Skip When We Hurry

There is also a relational cost to explaining too soon. When we offer polished explanations, we can unintentionally shut down deeper connections. Others may hear our certainty and assume the conversation is over, when in truth, the most tender parts have yet to surface. Sometimes what we need isn’t to be understood, but to be accompanied.

Resisting the urge to explain everything is not about withholding insight or avoiding reflection. It is about honoring the natural pace of understanding. It is about trusting that clarity earned slowly will be truer than clarity claimed quickly.

Naming the Rush

This is especially difficult for those of us who are articulate, thoughtful, and accustomed to making meaning. We are good with words. We know how to shape experience into narrative. But our strength can become a shortcut—one that bypasses necessary silence.

What if, instead of explaining, we allowed ourselves to say, “I’m still with it”?

What if we replaced answers with curiosity?

What if we trusted that not knowing—yet—does not mean we never will?

Standing in the In-Between

In this first part of the series, I want to simply name the rush. To notice it without judgment. To recognize how early it appears and how socially reinforced it is. Before we talk about how to stay or how meaning eventually arrives, we have to see how quickly we try to escape the space in between.

Because the space in between—the unresolved, the ambiguous, the unfinished—is not a problem to solve. It is a place to stand.

And sometimes, standing there is the most honest thing we can do.

(This is the first of three reflections on resisting the urge to explain everything—beginning with the rush, moving toward staying, and finally toward letting meaning arrive.)

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(Originally published on Substack on 2/2/2026.)

After the Lens…

You’ve just read an article from The Lens of Reason—a space for examining the patterns beneath our assumptions, the psychology beneath our certainty, and the quiet forces shaping our decisions long before we notice them.

If your curiosity leans toward the imaginative edge of these ideas, their questions unfold in a different form inside The Realm Between Realms, where speculative fiction explores how choice, consequence, and consciousness might shape unwritten futures.

I’m Dr. Jill Fandrich, author of The Missing Variable. I write for readers who believe clarity isn’t found by avoiding complexity, but by learning how to look at it differently.

Until next time, keep the lens clean.

Clarity begins the moment you examine what you’ve been “assuming.”

Thank you for reading through the Lens of Reason. Your presence here matters—each perspective strengthens the collective clarity we create together.