One of the best things about my job is meeting experts. The Ashmolean Museum where I work is full of them, and so is the rest of Oxford. The people I teach with are specialists – in history, modern languages, theology, classics, neuroscience, geography, literature and all sorts of other things – and they seem to know everything. It’s the greatest imaginable treat to work with them.
Some days though, and yesterday was one, it’s the hardest imaginable stretch to keep up with them. I feel as if, no matter how much I learn, it’ll never be enough and that I’ll always be slightly in the dark.
Seeing as how, at this time of the year, I get up in the dark, travel to work in the dark and leave work in the dark it seems like an appropriate metaphor for my whole life.
The thing is, that while I’m certain that learning is good, I’m also pretty sure that we just can’t know everything.
In the book of Proverbs in the Bible, the writer says that of all things, there are
four I do not understand – the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the sea and the way of a man with a young woman.
Proverbs 30, 18-19
Now those are indeed mysterious things, as anyone who’s ever watched a David Attenborough documentary, been on a boat out of sight of land, or been in love will know.
But sometimes, mystery is good. The mystery is not darkness. There is beauty in it, and intrigue, and wonder, and the truth of what it is to be human, finding our way with each other.
So when we see what we don’t understand, I reckon it can do two great things: it can make us amazed at this astounding and wonderful world, which, even when it’s dark, is an astonishing place to live.
And it can set off the spark of curiosity that makes us want to learn more about it. And the more we learn about the world, the more we understand it and each other, the more amazing it becomes.
This was published in the Pause for Thought book in 2016. You can buy it here. Go on. You know you want to.