The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
My eyes must indeed be closed. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to marvel at the mysterious.
Trying to find the right letters for Wordle is enough mystery for me.
I don’t find the unknown beautiful. It’s a source of either frustration or anxiety. I like things to be comprehensible and understood. I’m impatient with the mysterious.
They say God works in mysterious ways. But I don’t think He does. He’s deliberate and acts according to His perfect plan. We’re just the ones who aren’t privy to the minute details of it.
He even made Himself known to us through Jesus. And you can see His character revealed to us in scripture.
I like the light. I like the day. I appreciate when truth is revealed no matter how painful that truth may be. The hidden path, the mysterious darkness, hold no attraction for me. It scares me a little.
I wonder if the people who marvel at mystery truly know the pain of being lost. Or the joy and relief of being found.
I lost my son once for about fifteen minutes. He was five years old. One moment he was by my side at the shops. The next he was gone. His whereabouts was a mystery.
I didn’t sit back and marvel at the beauty of his disappearance. I was frantic with worry and madly retracing my steps searching for him. I found him chatting to a woman who was trying to see if she could locate his mother. Looking at my near crazed face, she must have been reassured I was the right person.
The mysterious is awful.
Imagine if murders were never solved. Imagine if the police force was comfortable with mystery. We’d be living in a world with sky high crime rates.
Imagine if Newton felt that apple on his head and just marvelled at the mystery of falling apples. He just left it there instead of working out why it did.
The mysterious is there as a challenge for us to make it known, to understand it. I don’t think it’s to marvel at and left on the shelf like a pretty ornament.
The WordPress team asked us today to write about something mysterious. I’ve given four examples. Disappearances. Unsolved crime. Things yet to be discovered by science. And Wordle.
Rant done. Thank you for reading.
For #bloganuary. Write about something mysterious.
Nomad Online 
4 responses to “Mysterious Things”
Einstein wrote this in 1931, as a response to a query from a publisher to sum his personal philosophy of life in 1,000 words. He was expressing that for those of us unable to make Kierkegaard’s leap into faith, there is at least some comfort in the knowledge that we don’t actually know all that much. Perhaps not such a beautiful salvation. Nevertheless, it’s all there is for some of us.
(replace the “[DOT]”):
luminousaether.wordpress[DOT]com/2015/09/28/the-way-home/
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I see. Thank you Kumi. I did not know that. Will check out your link.
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Aaahh. There was a sadness that ran through your words. A longing in the way you pieced your phrases together. From the wonder of the butterflies to your own (and perhaps our own too) search for home. Heart broke just a little Kumi. It was beautiful, wonder-filled piece.
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Thank you, Aggie. Yes. Why “Nomad” long ago caught my attention… a wanderer too, but one who travels with “home”.
Always, good wishes to you!
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