“Always keep a place in your heart for the unimaginable.” In just three short sentences, Mary Oliver dispenses a very profound wisdom on living. This in no way counsel’s against the need to plan or be disciplined in our living. It only advises the need to keep a small vacant place in our hearts.

Most of us live by filling our hearts the same way we also fill our calendars. Goals, hopes, fears, and answers crowd every nook. We schedule things like our careers, relationships, finances, and happiness too. But the most telling moments of life are not scheduled appointments. Love comes unannounced. Our sense of purpose emerges too late. Healing comes from places we never thought of, from people we never knew, from sources we never considered. Oliver’s words invite us to open our hands just a fraction so that such things can enter.

The Tyranny of Over-Control

Control has become a value in contemporary living. We are encouraged to improve, forecast, and design for outcomes. Although order has its application, too much control does not allow wonder its function. The dilemma of a controlled life was well summarized by the Buddha himself when he said, “Attachment is the root of suffering.”

Think, for example, about the parable of the closed fist that has been passed down in Indian spirituality. Once, a disciple asked his teacher how he could receive god’s blessings. “Open your hands,” he was told. “Your fist is full,” he said to the disciple. “How can anything else enter?”

Indian wisdom: Surrender without passivity

Openness is one of the themes that keeps echoing in Indian philosophy. On one side of the Gita is the exhortation to be committed and non-obsessive in action. Do your duty to the fullest and then do not encroach upon the dominion of others.

Rabindranath Tagore expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” Notice that faith has nothing to do with certitude. Faith has everything to do with being brave enough to believe in things that are not visible. Holding open a space in your heart means knowing that meaning can appear when there isn’t any visible light.

This is reflected in many epics from the Indian tradition. Valmiki, a notorious bandit, never dreamed that one day he would compose the Ramayana. His journey began neither with ambition nor desire, but with a moment of interior silence—a crack where the impossible happened.

International voices: openness as intelligence

In an international context, this wisdom is expressed in a different language. Albert Einstein once stated that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” To him, imagination and not knowledge drove his discoveries. Discovery and personal growth revolve around curiosity rather than certainty.

One who wrote similar things is Rainer Maria Rilke, in “Letters to a Young Poet”: “Live the questions.” Living a question means maintaining a space for an answer that does not yet exist.

Everyday examples of the unimaginable

Consider a medical doctor with money as the lone goal for entering medicine but finds true purpose for acts of service. A professional failure that changes someone’s course for a more suited path for their values. Someone experiences loss, which helps them become more empathetic and spiritually mature.

These experiences rarely appear as welcome at first. However, with the perspective of retrospect, these events will have the hallmark of importance. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote, “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” Often the unimaginable lurks beneath the guise of disruption.

Adhering to an Open Lifestyle

To maintain room in your heart, you don’t have to make big efforts. It starts with small acts:

  • Listening without preparing to reply.
  • Allowing silence without rushing to fill it.
  • To release the urge to categorize each experience as either success or failure.

These practices nourish interior room. They ready the heart, not only to bear the uncertainty but to be enriched by it. 

A closing reflection 

This, in essence, is a call from Mary Oliver’s poem. It is a call for living in humility in the face of the vastness of life. For recognizing that our maps are not the territories. For recalling the intelligence of wonder. When we hold a place for the impossible in our hearts, we don’t lose our way – we enrich it. We become less rigid, less human, less alive.

Dr. Prahlada N.B
MBBS (JJMMC), MS (PGIMER, Chandigarh). 
MBA in Healthcare & Hospital Management (BITS, Pilani), 
Postgraduate Certificate in Technology Leadership and Innovation (MIT, USA)
Executive Programme in Strategic Management (IIM, Lucknow)
Senior Management Programme in Healthcare Management (IIM, Kozhikode)
Advanced Certificate in AI for Digital Health and Imaging Program (IISc, Bengaluru). 

Senior Professor and former Head, 
Department of ENT-Head & Neck Surgery, Skull Base Surgery, Cochlear Implant Surgery. 
Basaveshwara Medical College & Hospital, Chitradurga, Karnataka, India. 

My Vision: I don’t want to be a genius.  I want to be a person with a bundle of experience. 

My Mission: Help others achieve their life’s objectives in my presence or absence!

My Values:  Creating value for others. 

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