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Lesson One Mystery: Wisdom Begins When We Embrace All That We Don’t Know As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
-Albert Schweitzer
When Albert Einstein got stuck on a problem-and truth be told, he got stuck quite a bit-he'd often go outside. Not to some remote wild landscape but to a little patch of forest on the Princeton campus, maintained especially for him, known as the Institute Woods. You might assume he was merely trying to clear his head, as a lot of us do when we step out for a quick change of scenery. But it's a more intriguing story.
Once out in those familiar woods, Einstein was said to stop and look around, taking in the trees and shrubs, the sky overhead, and the grasses underfoot. At first he'd try to imagine the workings of it all, knowing full well he couldn't do it. Consider that even today, more than sixty years after his death, we still don't fully understand everything that's happening in a square yard of dirt, let alone a patch of woods. But that was the point: He wanted to intentionally overwhelm himself. Get disoriented. Blow his mind. And thus, with his intellect brought to its knees, Einstein consistently found himself in a freer, more intuitive space.
Look deep into the mysteries of nature, he liked to say, and then you will understand better.
Einstein, like many other great scientists, knew that no problem was ever solved on the plane where it first revealed itself. So he used the woods to lift himself to a higher place, one less defined and more creative. Touching the considerable mystery afforded by that modest grove of trees allowed him to connect with what he considered "the source of all true art and science." He said as much to his students too, advising them that if they had a choice between gaining knowledge and maintaining a relationship with mystery, they should choose mystery.
That kind of choosing requires a very different kind of intelligence than the one with which the culture of Einstein's time was familiar, or even comfortable talking about. Yet he was absolutely certain that those who wouldn't or couldn't connect with mystery were "if not dead, then at least blind."
Albert Einstein isn't the only superstar with a penchant for dialing into mystery. Peering into the heavens at night, Carl Sagan claimed that science wasn't only compatible with mystery but was a profound source of it. The mystery that's revealed, he said, "when we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life . . . is surely spiritual."
Contemporary physicist Edward Witten, long a champion of string theory and arguably one of the smartest humans on the planet, sees mystery at the most fundamental layer of human existence. Meanwhile, Jane Goodall remains unwilling to explain life through truth and science alone. "There's so much mystery. There's so much awe."
If we're to make friends again with mystery, we'd be smart to learn something about where it likes to show up. One place it feels totally at home, of course, is in the arms of wonder. Which is lucky, because in truth we live in a time of extraordinary "scientific wow!" Who wouldn't be a little thrilled to learn that spiders can fly by employing electrical charges in the atmosphere? Standing on their hind legs, they cast silk into the air. That silk is negatively charged and repels similar negative charges in the surrounding atmosphere, sending the spiders ballooning into the heavens. Or who wouldn't feel a twitch of bewilderment to think that 99.99999 percent of our body is comprised of the empty space that exists between the electrons, neutrons, and protons-each one of those an element of the atoms that give us form. Furthermore, if you got rid of all this space, then the actual mass of your body-your "substance"-would be so small you couldn't even see it. In fact, if we took away all the space in all the bodies of every human being on the planet, the mass that remained would be about the size of a sugar cube.
Think, too, for a minute about the fact that as you walk down the street today you won't really be making contact with the ground. Rather, the magnetic force of the electrons in your shoes will be pushing away the electrons in the pavement, which means that at a supremely close-up level you really aren't walking through your life with your feet on the ground at all. You're floating. And then of course that old favorite: the fact that you could blast off from Earth on a journey to find the end of space, travel a hundred thousand miles an hour for the next ten thousand years, and not be one inch closer.
Or how about the extraordinarily curious fact that any of us is here at all? If the gravity in the universe had been stronger by just a tiny bit, then the stars that formed because of that gravity would have been much smaller. Our own sun might have lasted for only ten or twenty thousand years, fizzling out long before we humans or any other creature had a chance at life. Likewise, if the strength of the force that binds the nucleus of an atom were just a wee bit weaker, there wouldn't be the current range of chemicals in the universe. And without that perfect array of chemical complexity: no life.
Far from disenchanting nature, as early scientists of the seventeenth century pledged to do, contemporary biology, physics, medicine, and ecology are admitting its enchantment all over again, inviting us with every passing year to perceive a more unbridled universe. In recent decades especially, scientists have found themselves looking beyond the desire to hold reality still, drawn instead to the mysterious and fluid nature of the planet and the life it sustains. Showing us with every passing day how the physical and even psychological functions of this life are vigorous, dynamic, and effervescent.
The discoveries of modern science are more than fantastic enough to explode our intellects, which is really the first order of business when it comes to befriending mystery. But you can't really see mystery face on. It takes looking sideways, like the way you can only see certain faint stars by glancing slightly off center. The trick, in other words, is to manage the tools of perception.
Our perception expands when we realize that nature is engaged in a very big game of passing things back and forth-a mysterious ebbing and flowing, an appearing and disappearing act once described by philosopher Neil Evernden as the rhythm of exchange. One thing talks while another listens. One thing touches ground while another lifts off and flies. One part of the system waxes while another wanes. One thing dies and another is born.
When we link this rhythm-of-exchange idea to the concept of nature in ancient Greece-phusis, which refers to nature as life emerging from itself-what begins to shimmer on the edges of our imaginations is an unflagging set of symphonic movements all linked together to create the vast, incomprehensible weave that both holds and extends far beyond the more obvious anchor points of daily life. In truth, your very existence depends not so much on "things" as on rhythms of relationship that transcend the boundaries of your skin. It's a mind-boggling set of interactions that renders everything inside you and around you different this day than the last, all of it shifting and emerging and passing away.
So if this is how the world is-such a grand river that you can't immerse your foot in the same place twice-how come we have such a hard time seeing it that way? For starters, consider that while Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, and Carl Sagan were building their perception and ultimately their inspiration from what can't really be known, embracing mystery at every turn, key parts of society were preoccupied with essentially organizing the closet. And our educational systems in particular were being reworked by folks with some of the tidiest closets of them all. Too often, schools clipped the wings of wonder in our children and taught them instead to regurgitate facts. In musical terms, you might say the school orchestra handed us a stick and a plastic tub to beat on, when what we were born for is a grand piano.
To be clear, education wasn't always like this. There were times when we acted differently, when we chose to strengthen that wonder. Like the enthusiasm in the United States between roughly 1910 and 1920 for planting school gardens. While the movement was prompted in part by people leaving farms and taking up lives in the city, it had to do with a lot more than making kids aware of where their food came from. Much like the modern school garden movement of our own time, gardens back then were seen as a way to build on children's natural connections to nature, using that as a baseline for nourishing curiosity. And curiosity was considered essential for fostering critical thinking skills.
To be sure, over time a child might well come to see why a butterfly visits only certain flowers in the garden, grasping that it's the only insect with a proboscis long enough to reach the nectar. But long before that there would be the butterfly itself, dancing on velvety wings the color of twilight and autumn leaves, igniting an eagerness to look deeper-and by looking deeper, to begin to learn. As biologist Rachel Carson said, when it comes to guiding children, it would help to remember that it isn't half so important for them to know as to feel.
"If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom," Carson said, "then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow."
She was right. She still is. In fact a recent study by the American Institutes for Research shows that kids who participate in outdoor classrooms on average improve their science test scores by a remarkable 27 percent.
As for me, I was lucky. I had a little garden in the backyard, some trees, and a few good teachers. Stuff grew. By the time I was sixteen I could talk about all sorts of things going on outside. I'd take you to the six rows of peas in my mom's tiny vegetable garden, dig down into the dirt with a trowel, and show you a tangle of roots covered in little bumps and nodules. Thanks to my science teacher Mr. Longenecker, I'd be able to tell you about how those nodules are the product of another life-form, a bacteria that secures nitrogen from the soil, and further, that this nitrogen is an absolutely terrific fertilizer. We could talk about how bacteria thrive by feeding on the starches and sugars generated by the pea leaves. And even cooler, that those leaves are feeding aphids, the aphids are feeding the ladybugs, and the ladybugs are feeding the robin that wakes me up every morning of summer singing his heart out from the maple tree.
By age twenty, with two years of college under my belt, I could have told you even more. Had I noticed the ants crawling up and down my mom's tomato stakes, I would've been excited to tell you how trees, especially trees in drier climates, had employed ants as bodyguards. And that it worked like this: Scale bugs extract the sugary sap from the leaves for their dinner, doing so without harming the tree, then excrete what they don't use, which leaves plenty of sugar lying around for the ants. So pleased are the ants with all this that they've taken to keeping "herds" of scale bugs, moving them around the tree from place to place like so many sheep. The herds of scale bugs are happy. The ants are happy. The tree is happy too, benefiting from the fact that the ants, which are pretty ferocious, have taken on the job of repelling any interlopers intent on setting up shop and eating the leaves.
Thanks to a few good books and some fine teachers, I could've talked about all that. But mostly it was thanks to the fact that as a small boy I'd been thoroughly drawn in by the colors and shapes of the tulips and geraniums, charmed by the lumbering flight of the bumblebees, enthralled by the humping walk of caterpillars and the squiggles of worms flushed out of the ground after an Indiana rain.
The next time you venture out under the trees, or maybe some dark night turn your eyes to a sky shot full of stars, or even when you do nothing more than kneel down in the garden, always right there is the chance to be nudged back into such realms of wonder. It's mostly a matter of getting out of your own way.
First of all, just get quiet. That was Einstein's opening act when he went to the Institute Woods, where he took a breath or two and turned a calm gaze on all the life around him. Admittedly, if you're like me on a lot of days, you may feel like you're caught in a big river of constant obligations and distractions-a fact that can make such calm meditation harder for you than it was for Einstein. The very idea of quiet can be a little off-putting, seeming to open the door to something befuddling-a bit dark and sticky. Sometimes calm and quiet start out with us feeling there's really something else we should be doing. But keep in mind that even mice experience reduced anxiety levels when they're exposed to just fifteen minutes of quiet. Quiet lets us be in deeper play with the world. It allows us to calm down, consigning to the back seat for a few minutes our chattering, anxious, gum-snapping minds. Plain and simple, mystery lives beyond the chatter.
You may not remember, but back when you were a kid you were a master at this sort of deeply engaged focusing. You were by nature an experiential learner-one with no need to shoehorn what you were seeing, hearing, and feeling into boxes somebody else constructed for you. Standing under the flowing arms of a maple, the way you naturally gathered up the world would've allowed you to take in not just branches and leaves and trunk, but the bird and the squirrel and the ants and the sound of the wind and the flutter of sunlight in the leaves. And because at that time of your life the walls between you and the world were thinner, because your culture's habit of splitting off humans from what's around them wasn't yet fully entrenched, the whole scene, in the most wonderful way, also somehow held you-the kid who was doing the looking. Right now you may feel like that kid is long gone. But that's not really possible. Across a lifetime we'll add countless pieces of knowledge and perspective to who we used to be. Yet the ability to be nudged by curiosity closer to the world, to lead first not with intellect but with wonder, is still within your reach. And even better, as an adult you can consciously weave your innate sense of wonder into every aspect of your life-strengthening your sense of contentment, enlivening your relationships. In the end it comes down to engaging your ability to consider the world more broadly and deeply-talents of perception that got obscured by the demands of modern life.
