Being Baffled

Being Baffled

Yesterday, a friend was searching for a poem to share with people who are training to be coaches—life coaches not football coaches. (Although come to think of it poetry for football coaches might be a good thing.) 

As I thought about it, I realized that when I need coaching, myself, (which is fairly often) it is usually because I am feeling stuck, confused, mired in.

And what came to mind for me were these words by the farmer poet Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. Counterpoint.

What straightforward but head-spinning, multi-layered words!

I've been musing about what Berry's words ask of me.  

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

First he suggests that our current endeavor may not be our real work. What to do about that possibility? Not that we should toss what we are engaged with out the window, but rather that we should keep our hearts and minds open to something that is more our calling.  Calling to us.   If we are open to that possibility, we might spot some clues out of the corner of our eye.   Perhaps our real work (at this time in our lives) is something nearby, another dimension of what we are doing.  Perhaps something at distance.   A dream we've had and set aside.  Or even an out-of-the-blue surprise.  But if we're not open to the question of what is our "real work," we are unlikely to spot the clues that point us toward it.   

With our heads spinning with that idea, Berry's next words raise the possibility that our sense of confusion is a sign we are on the right track. 

And that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

Finally admitting we don't know is the beginning of uncovering a right path.  Having the courage to set off without knowing how it will all work out is the path of our real journey. Perhaps that realization will keep us more open, less fixed in our plans, less rigid in our understandings.  

His next line has always tickled me:

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

If you're not confused, or baffled, your mind isn't working hard enough.  Perhaps that's a way of saying that almost everything worth exploring is a complex system dynamic, and if we think things are simple we are really missing the richness of life.   Our mind is being lazy; it is not employed.  One day when I was being particularly tickled by this line about not being baffled, (because I feel baffled by all kinds of things a fair amount of the time) a friend who had trained as a large animal veterinarian (and later became a coach) said, as if in passing: "For people who work with large animals, a baffle is part of the barn system that keeps air moving to keep the animals comfortable."  I love puns, so this really caught me.  (I even searched out an article on increasing dairy cow comfort with baffles.) And then I thought about the deeper meaning one could take from my veterinarian friend’s observation: being baffled meant that we were less closed, that moving air, fresh air (and perhaps fresh possibilities) could get in, and we would stay healthier.  

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

And finally the poet’s notion that the stream is singing because it flows over rocks and logs.  Something is in the way.  And moving over and around that impediment creates the music.  Of our lives, perhaps.  When we see pictures of beautiful streams, with the light bouncing off the moving water, they are not flat, easy going streams.  Rather they are flowing over rocks and logs, around curves—impediments of all kinds.   In the same way we experience bumps in our daily life.   And what is the music? Perhaps our music is our creative capacity of all kinds—art, music, poetry, craft, design, innovation. 

So today I am particularly grateful to Wendell Berry, farmer-poet and wise elder, for a reframe of life’s confusion, set-backs, bafflement, impediments and difficulties.  I see them with different eyes, now.