The Fourth of July festivities have come and gone, the last of the smoke has cleared the water and our community is settling back into its familiar, post-holiday rhythm.

For weeks leading up to the holiday, people met, schedules were drawn, and the collective energy of the community was directed toward a singular weekend. Yet, anyone who has spent a single season here knows that planning in Southeast Alaska is often just a polite suggestion.

Living here means existing at the mercy of logistics. Our lives are shaped by the hard edges of supply chains, barge schedules and weather windows. When a critical shipment is delayed or freight doesn’t land when expected, our immediate human impulse is to write a script around it. We label it a disaster, a stroke of terrible luck or an omen. We are storytelling creatures, desperately eager to apply immediate, cosmic meaning to the hiccups and hurdles of daily life.

But there is an old Buddhist parable that challenges this exact urge.

In the story, a child is born to a village family. The neighbors gather in celebration, declaring the birth a magnificent blessing and predicting a life of endless fortune. A passing monk looks at the celebration and simply says, “We will see.”

A few years later, the child suffers a badly broken leg in an accident. The neighbors return, this time to wail and lament, declaring the injury an absolute tragedy that will ruin his future. The monk visits again, looks at the grief, and offers the same three words: “We will see.”

The story continues in an endless loop. Every time the community rushes to stamp a definitive label of “good” or “bad” on an event, the unfolding of time completely upends their judgment.

The wisdom behind “we will see” isn’t about adopting a posture of cold apathy. It is about recognizing the illusion of immediate clarity. We want to know the why of everything the moment it happens.

We want to believe that a disrupted plan has some grand, divine significance right now. But the truth is that life is rarely a series of neat, self-contained chapters. It is a continuous, fluid current.

The Fourth of July celebration offered a perfect mirror to this truth. A lot of logistical details were coordinated to make the holiday happen, but we could not control the clouds rolling over the water, nor could we dictate how the pieces would actually fall once the weekend arrived. Maybe the rain held off, or maybe it poured; maybe an event went off without a hitch, or maybe a sudden delay forced us to adapt on the fly.

The outcome of those moments wasn’t inherently good or bad while they were occurring. So much of that definition depends entirely on how we choose to look back on it now that the events are completed. Hindsight is the only place where true meaning is actually built.

As we look back on another holiday in the books, perhaps the most grounded gift we can give ourselves moving forward is to drop the heavy burden of rigid expectation. When the unexpected happens — as it inevitably does when you live on an island — we can take a breath, look at the changing tide and remind ourselves of the monk’s quiet truth.

We don’t know the end of the story because it hasn’t been written. For now, we will see.