BEWILDERMENT
The Isolation Blues;
reflections during covid-19
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment…
Rumi
Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.
Frank Moore Colby; American educator and writer
There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY,but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.
Michel Faber, “The Book of Strange New Things”
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In a world of inescapable complexity and bewildering incongruencies our challenge is to maintain a modicum of composure while we try to make sense of it. For clever people who are trying to figure it all out or are trying to make it turn out a certain way, it can be a frustrating, stressful and disappointing experience. This is why Rumi says, “Sell your cleverness and replace it with bewilderment.” Bewilderment is okay. Even though you may feel uneasy at times…you may have more questions than answers or you may feel a bit off-balance, again, that’s okay. Bewilderment allows us to explore what we don’t know as of yet, it buys us time to figure things out as we go, it opens us to the possibilities that we have not yet experienced or even imagined.
I recently purchased a classic snow globe that contains a winter scene of cardinals in the snow and cardinals perched in white birch trees. Of course, when you shake the globe the snow storm begins but within minutes (if you don’t shake it) the calm will return. This is a good analogy of our life as well as good advice for whatever lies ahead of us in the new year. When life starts to shake up your world like a snow globe full of white chaos skittering every which way and that, just take a moment, set down the snow globe storm on the window sill and simply watch it. Watch calmly. Watch with curiosity and wonder. Be bewildered, that’s okay. Even the bewilderment will settle. Watch closely with awareness and simply wait for the natural clarity of the glass globe to return. You don’t have to try too hard. You don’t have to make it happen. It will happen. No matter how hard your world has been shaken the calm will return, the settling of all things on the ground of your experience. Look out this day upon the beauty and wonder that surrounds us. Embrace it all; the chaos, the bewilderment and the beauty. It is all part of this season of lights, celebrations, holiday logistics, stormy weather and Christmas clutter; yet overhead in the clear night sky shines the stars, the planets and the dreams of us all.
Peace, bewilderment and wonder in the days ahead.
In the woods,
Dave
December 31, 2020
My 10 years as a child and family therapist-type of clinical social worker ended with retirement 13 years ago, but your essay prompted me to remember realizing, once, that my look of bewilderment or confusion (deeply furrowed brow, piercing stare) could just as easily have been mistaken by the children I worked with for anger. Perhaps, because cleverness is such a desirable quality in this world of ours, bewilderment causes a sort of self-anger at not being clever enough to figure out whatever is bewildering. I agree that it is important to give the dust, or snow, time to settle before jumping into a clever solution. I think physicians call this “watchful waiting.”
In seminary we called it being a “non-anxious presence.” But that made me kinda uptight…