Mystery!

I admit it – I’m a sucker for a good mystery.  During summer vacation when I was growing up, my mom would take me to our local library, and I’d load up on as many books as I could check out, most of them being Agatha Christie novels and Nancy Drew books.  Even as recently as last summer I found myself staring at the audio books in the bookstore, looking for something to listen to on my upcoming long car drives.  Nothing appealed to me until I saw – Sherlock Holmes!  I love the puzzle of it all, the acute observation, the clean and neat explanation of all of the clues and facts that are revealed at the end.  And I love learning the surprise element that didn’t occur to me (most of the time) while I was reading.

In the real, non-fiction world of our daily lives, we humans have benefited greatly from the role that logic can play.  Medicine and science are some obvious examples.  There are times when we could all use an extra dose of logic and objectivity.  For instance, how easy it is to get caught up in the waves of heated emotion around us!  This is especially so when the wave is large and numbers are multiplying – as in a riot or mob mentality.  You can see this behavior all the time in the stock market.  It is just the way we seem to wired at a base level.  Fear spreads quickly and it’s easy to panic.  Or the opposite can happen and undue elation builds upon itself and people get swept away, sometimes even using the chaos as an excuse to misbehave and act on their basest of impulses.

However, there are other times when, though logic is helpful, it’s just not enough. When we need more than our black-and-white, cut-and-dried, I’m-right-you’re-wrong minds. Even when we think we are being logical, chances are, we are choosing our facts based on what we wish to see.  We might as well admit that we are not as flawless in our thinking as we fancy ourselves to be, and that we do not usually behave (no matter how hard we may try) according to logic, but rather from a much more complex array of motivations.

In the hot-button issues of politics and religion, it’s especially apparent how counterproductive black-and-white, “factual” thinking is.  How quickly the rhetoric becomes becomes thick!  People become entrenched and defensive in their views and start to live, not their own best lives, but in opposition to something or someone else.  To a certain extent, this is how we are built.  We must play off of each other and react. But too often it becomes an emotionally charged, but fruitless (and endless) back-and-forth.

I once heard someone say, “Be careful who your enemies are, because you will become like them.”  This made very little sense to me at the time, but as time passes, and as I see how easy it is to live in a reactionary way, I understand it more and more.

This, to me, is where music, literature, art, and poetry can fill in.  Though the arts, like anything else, can be used in any way that humans can devise (good or bad), I think that the arts have the possibility, more than most other things, of taking us above rhetoric, above entrenched stances, above black-and-white thinking, and into direct experience if we let it.  As musicians, we bring our brains and logic with us to the practice room of course, but ultimately we can only be successful if we can bring creativity to our problem-solving, let go and trust, and be willing to think in constantly new and evolving ways.  This has to be one of the most beautiful things about a life spent in music and with music.  What worked for me yesterday in the practice room may need a little adjusting and tweaking today – or an entirely different approach may be needed to shake things up a bit after becoming stuck.  Something that appealed to me years ago may seem trite or stale today, while other pieces never lose their luster.  And there is always more music to discover!

I love the flexibility of it all – the constant molding and remolding.  I can’t help but think of an analogy I heard often as a child in Sunday School – to be like clay in the potter’s hand.  Pliable.  Willing to soften and adjust.

This doesn’t mean that bold proclamations can’t be made – that we can’t be committed and assertive in our decisions on and off the stage. We must be! Rather, it means that we can let fresh air flow through us, cleaning out the settled dust – or perhaps just letting the breeze stir the dust around a little bit and settle in a different place.

I wish I could see more of this softness and imagination we bring to music and the arts in the way we treat each other. I wish that, without completely abandoning logic, that we could also acknowledge the role of the the things that we perhaps don’t know or yet understand about the world and each other.  I admit to having a very rocky relationship with uncertainty.  Who among us doesn’t love solid answers?  But I’ve come to feel that perhaps a little unknowing can be more of an asset than most of us think.  I would go so far as to say that I believe that our human spirits NEED a certain amount of mystery in order to stretch our hearts and minds and inspire us to look outside of ourselves.

And that surprise element at the end of a mystery?  Ironically enough, it took the most outside-the-box thinking from Mr. Holmes, or Miss Marple, or Monsieur Poirot –  a kind of insight and creativity that no one else trying to solve the puzzle had.  But once solved, it was always the most simple solution.

So perhaps we should keep living side by side with our questions, embrace the unknown, and use our “little gray cells” to observe the world with open senses and to imagine a different way.