Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost
Reading this I realized, other than the profoundness of the message, how our cognitive abilities are a function of not only our intellectual faculties but also our particular set of experiences.
Ask anyone familiar with the flavour of burning desire, to describe Laila (of the Majnu) to you, and compare it against the offering of someone who hasn't ever experienced longing. You're bound to notice a difference.
What insight this passage offered to me right now, I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to draw at any other eventful period in life. Right now I've been at a stage in life to interpret a certain message better.
The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.
The interesting fact is that all transformation is borne at the wings of loss. It is the impact of the blow we bear, the unfamiliar dark of the life we step into, that we could become more than what we have been. In the action of growth, a small green shoot valiantly rebels against the basal force of gravity. It struggles, breaks through the ground, offering untameable rebellion, stepping into the unknown dark of pain and resistance ... and thus, developing into a full fledged plant.
And this brings me to the next thought... how come, when our understanding of the world is likely to be in a flux, our opinions of it are so rigid? Why is there so much finality in our perspectives? Why do we find it hard to see a tree when looking at a seed?
Does the degree of finitude of your own thoughts not disappoint you?
Does the degree of finitude of your own thoughts not disappoint you?
May your coming year brings you more of everything that means growth to you!
Image: Orion (at right), Sirius (bottom) and the pale wintertime Milky Way (center) are well-placed for viewing in late November. Credit: Bob King
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