Guard The Mystery
The mystery of creation is like the darkness of night--it is great. Delusions of knowledge are like the fog of the morning.
Tagore wrote this fragment in 1916 for Stray Birds, a collection of short aphoristic poems composed partly during a journey to Japan, where he had been struck by the compressed wonder of haiku. He was already a global figure, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature the year before, yet he kept insisting the world was larger and stranger than any single idea about it. This line draws a sharp line between the honest vastness of not knowing and the thin comfort of thinking we have figured things out. It speaks to curiosity today because real wonder starts by admitting how much fog still covers what we call knowledge.
Reflection
Tagore treated everyday mysteries as worth more than settled answers. What small mystery in my day can I stay curious about instead of explaining away?