Please Be Curious: Unsolved Mysteries – An Exercise in Quiet Inspiration

Your gifts, I believe, are born of chance and choice, primarily the latter.

Chance Sets the Stage

By chance, you are born with a specific set of DNA that oversees the building of your flesh and bones and the brain with which you’re born. By chance, you are born into a certain family in a certain environment in a certain part of the world. By chance, you have experiences that trigger certain thoughts and beliefs and ideas about the people you meet, about the world in which you live, and about you and where you fit in the grand scheme of things. Things happen, and those things have an impact.

Choice Sets the Direction

But almost from the very beginning, either consciously or unconsciously, you begin to make choices and thus interact with all those chance ingredients. You decide what you like and what you don’t like. You choose how you’re going to react to the people and places and events you encounter. You determine how you’re going to spend your time, what risks you’re going to take, what paths you’re going to pursue.

And all that choosing is what it means to be alive. Life, after all, is a chain of decisions, and the decisions loop back to determine what you make of yourself and the life you lead.

Blinded by Chance

But far too often, we forget this. We look at life as if everything is left to chance, especially when we gaze upon our heroes.

We look at the virtuosos, the masters, the guitar gods and literary goddesses, and do them a disservice. They amaze us, but we assume our amazement is born of chance alone. “They have a gift,” we tell ourselves, “They’ve been blessed.” We fail to give them credit for the work they’ve put in, the hours of practice, and the willingness to explore what surely was, once upon a time, a mystery to them.

We forget they were once beginners too.

Then we look at ourselves and do ourselves an equal disservice. We assume we are not blessed. We decide we have no gift. And thus we fail to begin and, worst of all, we fail to explore the mysteries that baffle us.

The Beauty of Mystery

While there may be such a thing as innate talent, the only thing that really separates those who are busy being and doing from those who only dream of it is the former’s choice to enter the unknown and attempt to solve the mysteries that bewilder and vex them.

The beauty of this world is its infinite supply of mysteries to solve. The minute you become curious, you become wealthy because your puzzle box runneth over.

And the beauty of human beings, including you and me, is that each of us has our own particular mystery or set of mysteries that perplexes us like no others. When people speak of callings, I think they’re really referring to mysteries. Each of us has a puzzle to solve. Regardless of whether or not we choose to try and solve it, it will besiege us.

Haunted or Engaged. It’s Up to You

If we become curious and pursue it, we will be engaged. If we try and ignore it, we will be haunted.

To lead a life of quiet inspiration, your job and mine is to decide what mystery or mysteries we most want to solve and then begin our detective work.

So I offer you yet another question to ask yourself in those moments when you can break away from all the noise and listen in on what your heart is saying. What mystery do you most want to solve?

What do you have to know about yourself, your world, and the people you encounter? What art form or endeavor is a puzzle to you? What must you simply discover how to do? What feat are you dying to know whether or not you can perform? Keep asking. The answer will emerge.

Make Your Mystery Your Mission

Have you been looking for a purpose? a mission? Why not make it this? To solve that puzzle or those puzzles. Pin your detective badge to your lapel and hit the streets. Let it become your obsession, the case you have to crack, then follow that trail wherever it leads. You’ll have little time for boredom and despair.

Tagged as: be curious