The case for mystery

Feeling the need to increase your "sense of wonder"? Add mystery to the list of things you value, protect, and guard.

Now, there's a lot to be explained in this line, and I hope you hang around to read. Crucial to really understanding what I mean is understanding my use of "mystery" and "wonder." I'll start with the latter. 

Frequently on Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, I see posts insisting on the importance of wonder. Tag lines include “retaining a sense of wonder,” “being in wonder,” or even some make the leap to talking about "awe," which is considered a synonym of wonder. I have no problem with this. I'm not sure where all of the attention is coming from, though. Do we think the idea has just been invented? Wonder is certainly worthy of attention, but the buzz-term status it seems to have reached lately is baffling. There's Palacio's children's novel Wonder that I've been a fan of since its publication in 2012 when my son Asher introduced it to our family, and I'm now aware that a book entitled Wonder: from emotion to spirituality from 2009 by a religion professor was still leaving its mark as recently as 2017 on the personal development world.

Are these these the heroes? 

“When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.”

“Kinder than is necessary. Because it’s not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed.”

“Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion to greatness.”

“It’s what you’ve done with your time, how you’ve chosen to spend your days, and whom you’ve touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success.”

~ quotes from Wonder, by R. J. Palacio (2012)

Who knows. I'm not complaining. I've posted about having a sense of wonder, too. Several months ago, I shared a friend's poetry podcast saying, that "his monologue repeatedly challenges me to expand my sense of wonder, see the beautiful in the out-of-way, marginal spaces . . . " Yada, yada, yada. There was no grand explanation or silly trepidation at the way that I played with the phrase. I knew what I meant and let it go at that.   It certainly wasn't the place to wax philosophical. Would've only sounded tangential. Perhaps even man-splainerish. No thanks.  

I do, however, have some things to say about wonder—if you’re up for it—but I’ll warn you of neuroscience and philosophical scripts ahead. 

To begin, wonder is an emotion. We can argue that it’s a choice, but what we really mean is that choosing to wonder will (hopefully) give rise to the feeling of wonder. Same thing with happiness. Eventually, we hope the choice births feeling. The gastroenterologist Dr. Anthony T. DeBenedet explains why wonder is an emotion in clinical terms.

Technically speaking, you feel it when a sensory stimulus provides new and expansive challenges to the limbic circuits in the brain. It’s a very playful quality, one that makes us pause in meaningful, lighthearted ways.

If we were content to stop here, we’d be complicit in science’s tendency to “tak[e] as the whole of reality that part of it [its] methods can report,” as Marilynne Robinson has argued in her essay “Humanism” from The Givenness of Things (2015). (If you don’t have the text, you can read an article excerpted from the essay in The Nation.) The adverbial phrase beginning with "when a sensory stimulus provides" means wonder must have an object; something stimulates the brain, and then we feel wonder. We can't generate wonder as an end in itself. It's always in relation to something else. Language has indicated this relationship silently since forever. We speak about "being in wonder at X" or "in awe of Y" or "amazed—another wonder synonym—at Z." All of these need objects, and my word-nerd friends will appreciate me closing the loop by calling the XYZs objects of the preposition. (I really want drop a reference to Plato's definition of a philosopher, but it feels inappropriate). 

My point, though, is that science validates what the humanities have known: wonder—as do all other emotions—requires an object. Something to trigger the response, especially if that trigger begins with a decision on our part to be curious, amazed, in awe—you get it. 

The unfortunate thing about buzz words is that they induce this anesthetic response within us that makes an issue out of what's-not-the-real-issue. Thus, when we see posts about cultivating a sense of wonder, we’re often left feeling like wonder is the end in itself. But wonder, like happiness, is better off as an attendant. Seeking happiness is the shortest path to discontentment, and I think the same is true for wonder. It’s better when we follow our curiosities simply because we can delight in the freedom of the inquiry. Something opposite but similar happens when we try to avoid less-enjoyable emotions such as anxiety or even fear. Think Donkey walking above the lake of lava in Shrek: the more he focuses on not looking down the more he looks down. Friends who struggle with insomnia have told me that nothing exacerbates insomnia more than being afraid of not being able to sleep. We short-circuit ourselves when we make an end of what’s better understood as process.  

So, for those wanting to increase their sense of wonder, I offer mystery. Not mystery novels and whodunits but rather mystery in the sense of spirited human inquiry that sees ignorance as an invitation to finding connections to big, vital questions.

Unknowing before the heavens of my life

I stand in wonder.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Here's an example, and if you've read any of my previous posts you'll recognize the material.

The butterfly. (My friend, Emily, is rolling her eyes.) It flits from milkweed to flower and rides soft breezes, splashing the lazy summer lawn with brilliant orange, purple, and red flashes. The question of how it became such a lovely creature is fascinating. Awe-inspiring. Awesome. Wonder-filled. But I think here, too, we focus on the attendant outcome when we should see the process. It’s anything but lovely. It’s violent. The worm built its own acid bath—the chrysalis—which then melts its maker into slimy goo with vitals sloshing against other vitals in a viscosity that eventually creates a butterfly. Why Nature chose this method is mysterious, and our ignorance of the process presses us to value that ignorance not as a stopping point but as an invitation to deepen our understanding of a butterfly’s transformation.

Granted, I’m not a butterfly scientist but a philosopher, and I’m amazed at how something within me saw the violence of the chrysalis and contracted that image to explain—with greater accuracy than logic has been able to do so far—my current stage of life: I resonate with the process. Hello to the mystery of perspective. I’m currently unrecognizable to myself. I’ll spare you the details but will add that the me I thought I was is best described as "dissolved" or "dissolving." I hope I'm being transformed, but that’s all I got because it’s dark within the chrysalis. 

What makes this a "mystery" is something you'll see me writing more about soon. Take this as the holdover: the image of the chrysalis helps me understand something that I've not yet fully experienced. It explains the unexplainable. And right now—while I'm sitting at my desk at 6.16am, which is where I've been since 4.30am—I'm curiously filled with rapturous wonder at the realization that my life includes an elixir of pain and anxiety of what is happening to me along with the profound hope that I'll see something marvelous and full of wonder materialize. 

Talk soon.

And Happy Birthday to my sweet mother! She turns . . . I won’t say, today.