Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

What’s in the box. On the Derwent one Autumn morn, April 2010.

Theme Thursday today, and I’ve finally made an effort.

People love not knowing stuff. Actually, that’s not correct! People hate not knowing stuff; what they love is the challenge of trying to find out the stuff that they know that they don’t know.

Inevitably, humans being humans and all that that entails, most people are frustrated and annoyed when they finally crack the code and solve the MYSTERY and find out the stuff that they knew that that didn’t know; the stuff that they hated knowing not knowing about, does not measure up to their expectations that their imaginations had set loose. Indeed, the MYSTERY around their lack of knowledge held an allure that reality just cannot match.

Today’s photograph is a good case in point. Walking to walk a few weeks’ back, I spy (with my little eye) a MYSTERYious object floating out in the river estuary. Handily, I am usually armed with a camera with a trusty zoom, and thus explored the MYSTERY a little more closely.

A box of some kind!

A box that appears to be floating untethered in the cruel ocean sea river estuary!

‘Whatever could it be’, I ask myself?

Is it a missing beautiful lady – a nightclub hostess, perhaps – brutally hacked to pieces by a jealous former lover, parts stuffed in an old apple crate and dumped from a bridge under the glow of a cold autumn’s moon? Has she returned to wreak the only vengeance she can from the dead: to pop up and allow justice to be done?

Might it be a package of the finest export-grade Bolivian marching powder™? A substance smuggled in on a small yacht manned by a lone, desperate Frenchman with a drinking habit out of control, a failed marriage behind him and gambling debts up to his earholes? In yet another bout of self-loathing fuelled intoxication and anger, he’s flung it over the side renouncing his debauched former life before scuttling his only love – a little yawl registered in Wallis and Futuna called Rêves Brisés – and mumbling the words to Non, je ne regrette rien whilst cradling a an empty bottle of Rémy Martin in one hand and a photograph of happier times in a yellow knit sweater in the other?

Perhaps it is waylaid shipment of enriched uranium, accidently knocked from a Belize container vessel in the South Pacific as it was boarded by Russian Spetsnaz forces (on the Israeli dollar)? A horde smuggled from a failed state that emerged from the disintegrating Soviet Union; once part of the forward defence of a grand empire spanning the globe, but now reduced to a shoddy –yet highly sought after – commodity to be bartered around some puissant religious ideologues who want it all and aren’t prepared to wait for Armageddon any longer?

Perhaps.

For the record; I believe that it is most likely a box of inflatable life vests or some such, carelessly knocked overboard by an aging GP desperately trying to recapture his youth and impress his long-cold wife.

Yet, like most of us, I prefer the MYSTERY.