Toward the end of my annual Bali From Within journey, I always schedule two days of rest and relaxation at a beautiful place. Participants have a little break after eight days of spiritual and artistic immersion in Ubud, and hiking and village life in Munduk, and they can use it in any way they wish. This year, for the first time, we went to Sidemen, in the eastern part of the island. Sidemen is not far from Bali's sacred mountains and is known for its emerald rice fields and community of weavers of the beautiful, ceremonial songket fabric.

For my own free day in Sidemen I set off on what the hand-drawn map provided by our guesthouse indicated was a long loop trek around a couple of villages, over a river, and through rice paddies. But the contours and contents of a place change all the time, and that is especially true when that place has a moist, tropical climate prone to energetic vegetation and where people are also trying to accommodate tourism. Suffice it to say that the map was difficult to follow and that a path that was supposed to lead past the bungalows of a small a hotel and then through rice fields disappeared within the grounds of the hotel, no longer in operation and sagging under broken bamboo beams and trees growing through walls. I climbed up to where the acres and acres of rice fields spread, to see if I could spot the path and saw no way forward. (continued) 

Photo of Sidemen rice fields from The World Effect blog.  

Both the maze and the labyrinth are structures made of complex, winding passages. They have a beginning and an end, but while you're meandering in the middle, you have no clear concept of where either might be.

In Greek mythology, the architect Daedalus constructed a labyrinth in which to house (or imprison) the bull-headed Minotaur. But as the two words, maze and labyrinth, have come down to us, they have acquired quite different meanings.

The labyrinth is a meditative journey. You enter and consent to the twists and turns you encounter, knowing that the path has a pattern and that you will be led gently and flawlessly along it. You know you will reach the center, then return home. On the way, you have time to reflect on other, more circuitous pathways in your life.

The maze, on the other hand, is a knot of alleys. Where the route of the labyrinth is one-directional, the maze confounds you with choices. One way leads on, perhaps to the exit, while the other bumps you into a dead end.

When we're in the midst of some dilemma in our lives, we feel like we're in a maze. Each decision we have to make seems dauntingly consequential: wild success or utter failure. And yet, when we look back on life and recall those tough decisions, everything seems to flow neatly together, with each event leading to the next in a lovely, well-fit pattern. What was a labyrinth now looks like a maze.

Life flows out from each choice, each step we make, as if there could have been no other. We must muddle through the mazes of life and look back with wonder. There is no other way.

In a letter to his brothers, penned in 1817, the poet John Keats posited a theory about a certain quality that a great writer needed to develop:

"I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

What is the meaning of this odd phrase, "Negative Capability"? What Keats was advocating was that when a poet encounters some fascinating phenomenon, he (and we will add she) should not try to make sense of it, but instead should open up to it and allow himself to be absorbed. What is "negative" in that moment is actually the poet's self, while the other--ocean, ancient monument, shepherd in love--fills the writer completely and imparts its essence to him or her. The poet inhabits the other more than herself and the poetic response can unfold from the inside out.

You don't have to be a poet, however, to benefit from Negative Capability. All you have to do is say Yes to fascination. So when you're hurrying to the office, for example, and birdsong pierces the air, stop and lose yourself for a moment in that music. If you see someone engaged in a novel task, whether cleaning a swimming pool or weaving cloth of silken threads, stop and let yourself be swept up by the currents of that activity.

The French poet and author of a book about Things, Francis Ponge, wrote that we cannot truly see something until we approach it, not as a superior, but as an equal with the capacity to startle us with the marvel of its selfhood. "It is necessary for things to disarrange you," says Ponge.

When we say yes to being absorbed by the other, we lose ourselves momentarily--and find ourselves more truly when we return.