“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
—Mary Oliver (1935–2019), Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet.

It is a truth universally known that, for time immemorial, I have done my best to bike with something approaching—but never achieving—religious regularity. A corollary truth is that I do so while listening to gospel music.

One morning a few weeks ago was no exception, but something exceptional happened. I was listening to the Old Time Gospel Hour Quartet Station with all the old songs playing, energizing–nearly electrifying–my indoor pedaling.

“Peace, Be Still.”

“Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.”

“I’ll Fly Away.”

All the hymns I grew up on and still love.

And right about the time I started getting into the rhythm and my heart rate started getting into the vigorous zone, an unfamiliar hymn started playing. I didn’t know the lyrics, and I didn’t recognize the voices.

I was stunned. But instead of allowing myself to be slain by the newness surrounding me, I found myself saying,

“Alexa, next.”

I wanted to get back into my old, familiar comfortable groove.

I can’t even tell you the name of the new song that I skipped. But that’s okay because as I kept on pedaling to all the familiar songs I knew to be true, I started reflecting on what I had just done, and a few Robert Frost lines from Robert Frost’s “The Sound of Trees”:

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?

The familiar. I like it. I suspect most of us do.

We like our coffee in the same cup, maybe even in the same chair, at roughly the same time every morning. We have our side of the bed. Our place at the table. Our route to the grocery store.

We have our rituals, too. The things we do without ever deciding to do them. We read the same morning news. We reach for the same cereal, the same brand of toothpaste, the same old linen shirt that should have been thrown away years ago but fits us in ways a new one never could.

We love the same sounds, too. A clock ticking in another room. Rain on the roof. The furnace kicking on. A dog sighing at our feet. A voice calling from somewhere else in the house. The opening notes of a song we haven’t heard in twenty years, yet somehow we know exactly what comes next.

There’s comfort in all of that. Real comfort. And who could blame us for wanting to surround ourselves with what we know? Life gives us enough surprises without our going out looking for them.

So we build little islands of familiarity wherever we can. We arrange our days with things we recognize. Things we trust. Things that ask very little of us except that we show up.

Maybe that’s why I said it so quickly that morning.

“Alexa, next.”

I wasn’t rejecting the song. I was reaching for lyrics I already knew. But here’s the thing. The familiar may ground us. It may comfort us, reassure us, even sustain us. I would not want to live without it.

But astonishment? Astonishment usually comes from somewhere else. It comes from the thing we didn’t expect. The road we didn’t plan to take. The book we almost didn’t read. The person we nearly didn’t meet. The idea we were certain wasn’t worth considering. The flower that suddenly appears where we know perfectly well we never planted one.

And then there’s the song I told Alexa to skip. That’s the one I keep coming back to. What if I had listened? Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it. Maybe three minutes later I would have forgotten it anyway. Not everything unfamiliar is waiting to astonish us and change our lives. Sometimes a new song is just a new song.

But sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes something outside the comfortable boundaries of what we already know slips in and unsettles us just enough. It makes us look again. Listen again. Think again. It gives us something we didn’t know we were missing because, until that moment, we didn’t know it existed.

And isn’t that where so much of life’s beauty comes from? Not always from the trees whose sounds we have heard forever. Sometimes from that other noise. The one close by. The one we almost didn’t hear.

Maybe that’s all the challenge needs to be.

Not to abandon the familiar. Not to stop loving the songs we know by heart or the rituals that give our days their shape. Not to go wandering off in search of astonishment every waking minute.

Just to leave a little room for it. To take a different road now and then. To order something we’ve never tasted. To pick up the book we ordinarily would pass by. To talk with someone whose life has followed a path nothing like our own. To entertain an idea long enough to understand it before deciding what we think of it. To listen when another noise comes close to our dwelling place.

I wish I could tell you that the next morning I found that unfamiliar hymn and listened to every note. I didn’t. I don’t even know what it was.

Maybe that makes the lesson better. Some opportunities circle back. Some don’t. And sometimes we never know what beauty, surprise, or possibility was waiting inside the thing we were too quick to skip.

So I’m going to keep my old songs. Every one of them. I’m going to sing along when they play, pedal a little harder when the spirit moves me, and take all the comfort they have to give.

But the next time an unfamiliar song starts playing? I think I’ll listen, at least for a little while.

“Alexa, don’t skip.”