“Everybody is wondering why and where they all came from. Everybody is worried ‘bout where they’re gonna go when the whole things done. No one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me. I think I’ll just let the mystery be.” Iris Dement, Let the Mystery Be
This song popped into my head today on reading from this from Rachel Remen.
“One of the things that I have learned since my medical training is that it is possible to study life for many years without knowing lie at all. Often things happen that science can’t explain. [In this instance, a spontaneously cured “fatal” cancer.] Life may not be limited by the facts”
Remen sums it up later:
“Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and that the world may be quite different than we believe it to be.”
This of course channels us directly to Judy Collins from Both Sides Now – “I really don’t know life at all.”
It occurs to me that the (or one of the) difficult part(s) in life (particularly given Google) is not in gaining knowledge, not in knowing what I need to know, but recognizing what I don’t or can’t know and having the strength, faith, courage, to “let the mystery be.” That, as Remen puts it, “can be very stressful, even frightening.”
It occurs to me... 