The Gentle Art of Living the Mystery

I wanted to witness a lotus bloom at sunrise.

So, for several days, I had been returning to the same quiet lake—sitting in still anticipation, just before dawn, wrapped in silence and a bit of childlike hope. There was something about the idea—a flower opening itself to light, not with force, but with grace—that called to me. On one of those mornings, as mist curled over the surface of the water like a secret unfolding, I saw it happen—not in an explosion, but in a gentle yielding. And in that hushed moment, something inside me softened.

I realized, we try too hard to understand life.

To force it open, to solve it.

But maybe life isn’t meant for that.

Maybe it’s like the lotus.

It blooms when it’s ready, not when you tug at the petals.

Life is not a problem to be solved.

It is a mystery to be lived.

But how often we forget.

We move through life with furrowed brows, checklist minds, and clenched hearts—treating pain as an error, love as a transaction, and silence as a void to be filled. We long for clean answers in a world made of contradictions.

I’ve met many who wrestled with this paradox. One of them, surprisingly, was from my own childhood.

We studied together in the evenings during our school days, though we were in different schools. He was always a serious thinker—too serious, some said. He’d get lost in issues with almost everything he stumbled upon. I used to wonder, even then, whether it was necessary to think so much. I preferred getting my assignments out of the way as quickly as I could so I could return to the things that truly stirred me—reading all sorts of books, playing chess, experimenting with sketching, dance, and storytelling.

He, on the other hand, would trail behind in everything—homework, chores, even simple tasks he’d promised to do. There were days I quietly did some of his assignments, thinking I was helping. But the teachers caught on quickly—the handwriting betrayed me. I later realized I wasn’t really helping either of us. Some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved by others.

We lost touch after school. His family moved to Mysore, and time did what it always does—moved on. But just last week, at a quiet social gathering, we met again.

It wasn’t hard to recognize him. The same faraway eyes, the same soft-spoken curiosity about everything—only now lined with decades of solitude. He never married. Retired as a bank clerk. Still lives in the same ancestral home. From the outside, not much seems to have changed.

But what struck me wasn’t what he had or hadn’t done. It was how he had lived—with the same childlike curiosity, the same quiet contemplation, as if the world was still unfolding its meanings to him. He never tried to fix life. He never rushed to label it or sort it. He had simply allowed it to be what it was. His life wasn’t an unresolved problem—it was a lived question. A model mystery.

Nothing wrong.

Just another piece in the grand mosaic.

Another song the universe is humming.

And I contrast that now with someone I met years ago—an astrophysicist in Tokyo. He had spent his life decoding galaxies, but over tea one evening, he whispered,

“I spent decades solving the universe. But the day I stopped demanding answers and started listening, the cosmos began to speak in ways I never imagined.”

One lived with telescopes.

The other, with questions.

Both, in their own way, embraced mystery over mastery.

And somewhere in between is a weaver woman I once met in a coastal village—her husband lost to a cyclone, never found. Yet she lit a lamp every evening. Not to chase away the dark. But to honour it. She said,

“I don’t light the lamp to see clearly. I light it so the darkness knows—it doesn’t scare me anymore.”

Perhaps that’s all life is asking of us.

Not to solve it.

Not to conquer it.

But to stand beside it,

to walk with it,

to hold its hand and not flinch when it trembles.

Some lives move like rivers—restless, flowing, reaching.

Some settle like stones—still, reflective, rooted.

And both belong.

Both are sacred.

So, I tell myself – let us live the mystery.

Let us drop the burden of needing to understand, fix, or explain.

Let us be open, foolish, tender, and brave enough to feel.

Because in the end, the heart doesn’t bloom in answers.

It blooms in wonder.

And the river never asks where it’s going.

It just flows.

And still, it reaches the ocean.