When we left San Francisco, a close friend, Aline, gave me a tiny blue glass bottle with an itty-bitty scroll inside with miniature letters I couldn’t quite read. Attached to the bottle was a note, “Learn to love mystery.”
My husband and I are away alone for two days—we’ve only done this twice without children in 19 years. It is startling, especially in this lovely, spare cabin in the woods, to waste an entire day doing nothing but listening to the rain and a crackling fire. I am a doer, something that has served me; however, it is also something that has handicapped me. I have a hard time sitting still.
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“Look at that fog bank,” my husband Gregg said, handing me his binoculars. He had walked the periphery of the property in the drizzle and laid down a deer skull and two hip bones, cleaned by coyote, three empty snails of two different species, and a tuft of moss that looked like a million tiny Venus Fly Traps. I looked.
Why is it so hard to notice treasures like these at home?
The poet Mary Oliver would intentionally set out to walk the back bay near her cabin on the northern tip of Cape Cod, not just to scavenge for dinner—clams and wild edibles—but also mystery, something that would tickle her brain, help her see something she hadn’t seen before. She made the search for mystery a habit, which translated into thousands of poems over her decades of writing life.
Pablo Picasso once said he spent a lifetime as an artist trying to once again see like a child.
As we age, all those branching neural pathways in the brain slowly self-prune. We are efficient creatures. After all, just like it is easier to fix the same breakfast every day, it is faster to take the eight-lane Highway 40 East to get home than the two-lane routes through small towns with stop lights and speed traps.
In other words, it is no mystery how we get in a rut.
More than one geriatrician will tell us this is bad for our brains. Furthermore, intentionally doing something different—even as simple as brushing your teeth with the opposite hand or parking our car on the other side of the grocery store parking lot—helps keep us on our toes.
And while it is a rare treat to spend a weekend in a retreat as beautiful as this one so intentionally designed by Tom and Lisa Barrie, it is possible with relative ease, to shake things up in almost anyone’s day-to-day life.
It’s a new decade. Do something different. Be curious. Welcome mystery.