Experiencing Mystery
when we don't even look for a solution
I come back to this quote often: “The mystery of life is not a problem to solve but a reality to experience.” — Frank Herbert, Dune
It hits hard for me. The mystery of life. The search for meaning. The discovery of self. These are the big phrases we toss around as if, with enough thought, enough suffering, enough reading, enough quiet mornings staring into coffee, we might eventually get the whole thing to click into place. The final piece of the Puzzle.
But there are no formulas. No equation to balance. No final phrase to embody. No line we cross where the clouds part and we finally get to say, “Ah, yes, that was the point.”
For most of my life, I treated meaning like a problem. I’m a problem-solver, so there must be a solution. There’s a surface area between the knowable and the unknowable. All we need to do is spend time there to move things from the unknowable to the knowable. Somewhere, hidden underneath all the noise, there must be an answer good enough to quiet my disquieted mind. Maybe not a central truth, but a sentence I could tattoo on my soul and use to organize the rest of my days. Find the sentence, solve the life.
Even “life is a journey” has always felt incomplete to me. A journey implies a destination. Maybe not a literal one, but still some movement toward somewhere. Some promised land. Some better version of ourselves waiting just over the next ridge. I have always known it was an over-simplification. Journey does also imply direction…it’s how you get to the destination. That’s the part that kept it in my lexicon. I don’t want to drift aimlessly through life pretending that all choices are equal. They are not. Some choices build us. Some choices hollow us out. Some pieces fit. Some pieces clearly do not. we can choose direction without choosing destination. We are choosing participation.
If life is a mystery to experience, then we don’t get the comfort of solving it. Like, ever. We don’t get to stand outside of it, analyze it fully, and then re-enter with a prophetic calm to guide us to the holy land. For our fleeting time here as conscious beings we are inescapably inside the thing we’re trying to understand so our understanding is forever partial. Bound by physics and a very thick skull. We are building the Puzzle while also being built by it. We are placing pieces without ever seeing the full picture. And it drives me batshit crazy.
The engineer in me wants the problem to solve. That’s what I do. The entrepreneur in me wants the path. The philosopher in me wants the why. The deeper I go, the more I know that mystery is not withholding an answer from me. It doesn’t want me to struggle to find it. The mystery just is. A problem ends when it is solved. It feels good. We “accomplished” the solution. A mystery deepens when it is lived. Even typing this creates a cognitive dissonance.
I’m confident I don’t have to abandon direction to experience the mystery and that helps calm the existential anxiety. I don’t have to stop choosing the wood I chop and the water I carry. I don’t have to surrender into some vague, passive acceptance where everything matters so nothing matters. Emptiness, Nishitani’s sunyata, allows space for relational creation. I can still choose. I can still build. I can still care deeply about my work, my children, my marriage, my health, my impact, my Puzzle. But I have to hold those choices differently. Less like proof that I have found the meaning.
More like offerings into the mystery.
