How Can Mystery Support Us in Uncertain Times?
None of us know what our future holds. We really want to know, but we don’t.
Sometimes our resistance to not knowing the future is subtle. Other times the picture we have painted for our future, whether ‘dark’ or ‘light’, born out of our frantic obsession with wanting to know, becomes all consuming in its clarity.
Uncertainty seems to be the word on everyone’s lips these days. It's as if we 'should' know the future, or at least be able to fill the gap where certainty ‘should’ be.
Yet, when we are in uncertainty we are also in a place of mystery. Looking at the present and the future through the lense of mystery I can hold both what is certain and uncertain with equal curiosity. This is a time of spring, a time where life is perennially born out of darkness. How, why or when a snow drop will push up through the frozen ground and snow is a mystery to me; yet it’s something I can trust, even if not understand.
Mystery calls me to an adventure in which I don’t have to know the outcome. It is an invitation, in which in every moment I am both the creator and an active participant in how the story unfolds. Instead of pointing me to what is not, it invites me to be curious about what could be, how it could be and why it could be? Life happens TO me when things are uncertain, life happens BY me, WITH me and FOR me when life is a mystery.
Mystery has almost infinite potential, that can surely only ever be realised if we recognise our interdependence with each other, with nature, with the cosmos, with the Great Mystery. Wherever we are and whoever we are, we can’t have arrived here by ourselves and we can't have arrived here without trusting the natural cycles of the days, months and seasons.
Weird and wonderful things come out of mysteries. The evolutionary cosmologist, Brian Swimme said, “Take hydrogen and leave it alone for 13.7 billion years and it turns into rose bushes, giraffes and humans.”
You and I are not only part of a mystery, we are a mystery. We are not an uncertainty or part of an uncertainty, nor a statistic that belongs to a calculated plan. If you know what the plan is then congratulations, but don’t tell me, because I don’t have a clue and life is sweeter for it.
What is next for our society, our ecology and our economy is both an uncertainty and a mystery, but if our leadership (our own and that of others) continues to shut down in fear and defend against uncertainty then we will only manifest an uncertain future. Likewise, if our leadership only focuses on what is missing, then we won’t be able to recognise the gift that is ever emerging right before our eyes, under our feet, in our hearts.
It takes all of us, in our own unique capacities as leaders to admit where we are stuck and fearful and enter into a dialogue with the unknown. Then we can begin again in the heart and ask ourselves why we live and why we lead. We can allow ourselves to answer the call to adventure, be swept into new territory and watch in awe and wonder as to what emerges. This way we might discover courage, beauty and a special joy that only comes from befriending mystery.