Perhaps it’s a British thing: keep calm, stay sensible, get on with it. While others hunt for signs and secrets, I’m quite content to sip my tea and assume the explanation is already lying somewhere obvious, waiting for someone practical to pick it up.
Mystery? What Mystery?
I’ve long accepted that I’m simply not built for mystery of any kind and don’t have them. Not in my personal life, in the wider universe, or even in the sort of drama other people insist on “manufacturing.” I’ve never had much patience for the idea that the world is full of hidden forces or secret meanings, secrets that can’t be explained.
To my mind everything is usually, and often painfully, more obvious than we pretend. We want the unexplained because it flatters us and makes life feel grander. With mystery, life is more enchanted, more like a novel with a twist waiting in the wings, but most things are exactly what they appear to be, just viewed from the wrong angle or with the wrong assumptions.
I don’t believe in cosmic riddles, or gods, sprites, that sort of thing. Anything that pops out of trees to rearrange our destinies has been committed to a fanciful past. I don’t believe the universe whispers clues to us in the quiet of the early hours of the morning, or hides messages in the design of the wallpaper we bought from IKEA. Life isn’t a puzzle box and never has been.
Professor Brian Cox, a well known physicist, constantly tells us about the forces of the Universe and we learn more and more about what was once a mystery. After listening to Professor Cox, life is more a collection of rational forces than mysteries. Mystery becomes more about experiences we haven’t fully understood yet, people we haven’t met so far, and information we haven’t found. Once those pieces fall into place, “mystery” dissolves, and we’re left wondering why we ever thought it was complicated.
Even the grand human dramas tend to resolve themselves with a thud rather than a flourish. The father of the ‘mystery’ child is almost always the person you suspected it would be but hoped it wasn’t. The strange noise in the night is just the boiler that needs replacement. The missing keys for my old car are in yesterday’s coat that I hung on the bannister rather than putting them away. The universe isn’t teasing us, we’re just not paying attention to the world around us and we should pay attention.
So no, I don’t “do” mystery as some people do. I don’t chase the idea in film and books and the activities of daily living. Mystery isn’t romanticised, and I don’t assign it any special status. I simply wait for the explanation which is invariably closer than we think and far less sophisticated than we imagine.
It goes without saying that although I write about the lesser saints, I don’t go along with their ‘mysteries., I like de-bunking them looking for the fake saint and the plainly preposterous. At the same time I accept humanity in its shapes and forms.
Perhaps refuting ‘mystery’ is a traditional British sort of thing. Something that’s emotionally calm and safe, unshowy, a touch unimaginative in the best possible way. We’re not a people who look to the heavens for answers. We put the kettle on, tidy the loose ends, and get on with it before people come over for tea. No cosmic dramas allowed and the English Reformation taught us to chase divine intervention away. We certainly don’t entertain grand revelations.
Just life as it is, dealt with as sensibly as we can manage without blaming the universe or waiting for applause.
Further Reading
The Shape of Now: Meta Hub – This article is part of the Shape of Now Meta Hub, a curated collection exploring culture, politics, identity, and the present moment.