Mysteries and Problems

I woke up this morning at 2:55am. I nudged my sleeping wife next to me.

“It’s time,” I said. “Let’ go.”

We wanted to see the Lunar Eclipse.

Our puppy, Betty, didn’t understand why we were getting dressed to leave the house, but she decided that she didn’t want to be left behind, so she joined us.

We live in a rural area of Vermont surrounded by a 400-acre nature reserve. There’s no light pollution and we were blessed with a clear, uncorrupted sky. The temperature was hovering around the freezing mark and there’s something about cold air that makes the sky seem crisp. We walked down the driveway about 50 feet, turned off our flashlight, and looked up. There it was – a round, reddish softball, sitting elegantly amongst thousands of stars.

The moon appeared so much larger than any of those glowing gems which dotted the surrounding sky.

I spotted the big dipper, just north of the moon.

“Look,” I said. “There’s the big dipper. It looks like the shopping cart at the supermakert.”

“How poetic,” my wife replied.

But how can any composition of words compete with the experience of the galaxy in its eclipsical glory?

Phillip Simmons, who at the age of 35 contracted ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) said,

“At its deepest levels life is not a problem, but a mystery.” And, borrowing from Gabriel Marcel, he continued, “problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not.”

At that moment, Linda, Betty and I were witnessing a true mystery. You may think that if you understand the astronomical explanation of what is taking place – the moon lingering in the earth’s shadow – that you have solved the mystery.

But you haven’t. You have simply come up with an explanation, in words, for what you are experiencing. The mystery goes way beyond the words that try to explain it. The mystery is how I am here at this very moment looking at the galaxy. The mystery is how my eyes work. The mystery is how the stars came to be and that some of those stars we can see may no longer exist. The mystery is that Betty is looking up at the sky and we don’t know what she is thinking (or if she is even thinking at all). The mystery is how Linda and I discovered one another on a planet with billions of people and how we stayed together for more than three decades.

But I find myself in an unusual state – for in these moments of awe and wonder, there is nothing to be done. Nothing to be solved. Nothing to be fixed. I find this a rather strange experience, because so much of my life, my days, involves solving problems.

The WiFi isn’t working. There’s no kindling for a fire in the wood stove. There’s an error in the proof of Thirty Thousand Days (our journal). Someone can’t log in to a Zoom webinar. There’s a tree down on the driveway after the gale-force winds last night.

These are problems that need to be solved. They require action. Some intervention is necessary. Something needs to be fixed.

But looking up at the star-studded sky at 3:15am with a little red ball as the centerpiece requires nothing but my attention. Correction: my undivided attention. Which seems easier to offer in the middle of the night than it was yesterday at 3pm when my to-do list is laughing at how little I’ve gotten done.

Simmons says, “What does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence. That we fully , consciously, hand ourselves over. That is all, and that is everything. We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions.”

Many years ago, when my two daughters were perhaps 9 and 10 years old, we took a walk around the grounds of the ToDo Institute. Before we took our walk, I offered a challenge – see if you can just notice things and appreciate them without getting caught up in what we should do to change or modify what we are seeing. In other words, see the landscape, the grass, the bushes, the trees, as a mystery, not something to be improved or changed.

It was a fascinating exercise, but one of us had great difficulty with it. That person would point out that the apple tree branches need trimming. Or we should widen the path to the compost. Or maybe move the rhubarb and plant another rose bush instead. What about a gazebo over by the maple tree? Wouldn’t that be cool?

Think of how much time you spend trying to fix and improve your life, your house, even the people in your family. That’s the life of a full-time handyman. But observing, attending, and admiring is the life of a poet. My life, maybe most of our lives, are out of balance. Lots of repairs, improvements and modifications. Not enough poetry.

So I offer you the same challenging exercise. Find a slice of nature – some woods, a park, maybe just a few flowers or a collection of bushes. See if you can switch your mind into mystery mode and away from problems solving/improvement mode. Give your presence completely to the mystery of what is in front of you.

If you’re like me, you have problems in your personal life that need to be addressed. You probably have family members and friends with problems as well. Our country has no shortage of problems right now. And the world, the planet, . . . let’s not get started. But I find some solace in knowing that the galaxy I witnessed last night doesn’t seem to have problems or need improvement. At least nothing that I need to do. Stars are exploding. Asteroids are crashing. Meteors are showering. Things are happening and it is all just as it is.

And we don’t have to be swept up by the Milky Way to recognize mystery because it’s all around us every day. We just have to take a break from our problem solving to notice.

Gregg Krech has been teaching and practicing Japanese Psychology for 35 years. He has published five books including, The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology (2014). He is the editor of Thirty Thousand Days: A Journal for Living on Purpose and the Director of the ToDo Institute, a nonprofit organization in Vermont dedicated to the teaching and development of Morita Therapy, Naikan and Kaizen. His writing can be found at the website: thirtythousanddays.org

Much appreciation to Phillip Simmons (1958 – 2002) for his wonderful book Learning to Fall

The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.