Within the past few days, debris from the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 [1] has started piling up on the beaches of the French-ruled island of Reunion, consistent with a crash some fourteen months ago in the Southern Indian Ocean basin, after a plane with no likely living inhabitants crashed into the ocean after running out of fuel. The main body of wreckage for the plane has not been found, but with the melancholy wreckage of the plane, including suitcases and bottled water and parts of the wing of the plane demonstrates the fate of the airplane pretty clearly. In order to understand what happens with an ill-fated airplane, recourse is generally had to the black box, with its records and telemetry allowing researchers to reconstruct the final moments of the flight when there are no witnesses alive to tell the tale, nor any bystanders able to provide an eyewitness account. The black box, in other words, stands as a witness to that which mankind was not able to witness, that we may be able to perform a post mortem on an accident and make whatever changes of a regulatory nature are needed in order to prevent such a disaster from happening again. Unfortunately, in a case like this one, the fact that the wreckage site is still unknown means that the location of the black box is itself a black box, a mystery within a mystery, even if there are likely explanations for what happened. The search continues because as human beings we do not like things to be unanswered, unknown, and unsolved.

One of the reasons people like mysteries is that they test our abilities to solve what is unknown through various means, such as the search for evidence, the brilliant inspiration of intuition, the accumulation and analysis of large amounts of data, or the process of various types of human and machine reasoning. I happen to be fond of mysteries myself, and I appreciate when a mystery is solved, that we can understand something better, and put it to rest, and move on to something else, even if the events that have been solved may still nag a bit at us. I suppose, like much else in life, my fondness for mystery began with a mysterious life. In my own case, the personal mysteries that drove me to be fond of mystery novels [2] were dark, and some remain unsolved. Those which remain unsolved I largely do not want to know about in more detail. It is that which is known to be unknown that spurs our investigation onward, that leads us to know and to understand more. Mystery is therefore a spur to study, to examination. When we think we know everything, we cease to be curious about the world around us, and become complacent in what we see as a large amount of knowledge, even if we remain ignorant of far more than we are aware of. A knowledge of our ignorance helps us to remain humble and curious.

Yesterday afternoon, just before leaving work, my phone reporting system at work was updated. This morning, and for the entire day, I have been untangling the various mysteries that have resulted from the change in reporting. The fact that I have been suffering from massive headaches all day did not make the headache of all of the formatting problems any easier, which resulting in a lengthy and sometimes fierce conversation between myself and various other people involved. Near the end of my day at work, the mysteries appeared to have been solved, which will ultimately simplify the reports I do but in the short run will make them even more complex. The fact that it took so long was largely due to the fact that a lot was changed but those changes were not communicated, which meant that one headachy and particularly cranky person was left to unravel the mystery, with help. The solving of the mystery revealed a great deal of interest, including a puzzling relationship between the phone system and Microsoft Excel that changed as a result of a change in the way that tables were represented in the reporting software. To be sure, these are mysteries that are not of great interest to others, but they are the sorts of mysteries that fill my existence and that made today a far more interesting day than is usually the case, even if it was interesting in a way that was often stressful and frustrating. Still, mysteries are mysteries nonetheless. It is our discontent that spurs us forward far more often than our complacent contentedness, and among the constants within my life is some sort of discontent to drive me forward to new insight and understanding.

Often it is the case, though, that the black boxes we encounter cannot be solved without the help of other people. To some extent, each of us is a black box to everyone else. We all have behaviors and words that can be understood well enough, if not perfectly. If we are reasonably perceptive, and likely at least somewhat sympathetic, we can gather what is going on with someone. We may be able to recognize if someone is in a particular degree of distress, and so on. Yet the outcomes, the writings and behaviors and spoken words and facial expressions that we see are merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, concerning the beings that we encounter. The motivations of people that lie within, the dark memories and horrors that drive them forward, the powerful and deep longings that push us on, are often a mystery to others. Even where they are glimpsed by inference, they are easy to misunderstand and difficult to view with fairness and understanding. We struggle to see ourselves well beneath our own self-deception and misdirection and inattention, and if our own interior lives are sometimes a mystery to us, even more so is the depth that lies within other people. And yet much of what we want in this world requires us to work well with others, which means that we need to turn our attention to the black boxes we encounter, and hope that they are willing to communicate their secrets to us so that we may better understand the wreckage of our world and the suffering of the people who dwell on it struggling against the darkness that threatens to overwhelm us all.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/vanishing-act/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/tag/mystery/