Reflect

Where does the sky end? What is love? How do our hearts beat on their own? What is consciousness? So many questions we can’t fully answer about why we’re here, how it all works, and what it means to be alive. These mysteries, all that we can’t fully name or comprehend, are gifts to be treasured. Wouldn’t it be a far less interesting experience to be alive if everything had a clear and concrete answer?

The historian Diana Butler Bass writes, “To know the mystery of life is to be grateful in all things. In all things, with all things, through all things.” There’s an invitation in these words to receive and appreciate all that we’re offered, including all that we cannot understand. When we try to reduce life to something easily explained, we can miss its very essence, including those ineffable things like love, joy, and awe that make us feel most alive.

In thinking about how to help heal the fractured world, concrete action is important, but so is a sense of wonder, time to ponder unanswerable questions, and the willingness to be swept off our feet by the beauty of it all. When Albert Einstein said that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” he was on to something. It is in the inexplicable aspects of life that we find the greatest opportunity to experience the richness of the world and, by extension, the greatest motivation to care for it.

This week’s practices invite you to embrace the awe and mystery of life.

Bonus Resource

Savor this delightful video of poet Naomi Shihab Nye reading her poem, One Boy Told Me.