Education Quote by Hugh Mackay

Uncertainty gets recast here as an advantage, not a disruption - and that’s the quiet provocation. Mackay isn’t praising chaos for its own sake; he’s elevating the kind of person who’s been forced to revise their story mid-sentence. The line “sudden new twists” carries the emotional temperature of shock: illness, divorce, migration, job loss, unexpected love. The point isn’t that change is good. It’s that being changed can widen your perceptual range, making you less invested in tidy explanations and more capable of living with unresolved questions.

The rhetoric is carefully hedged. “Perhaps” signals modesty, but it also disarms resistance: this is an invitation to consider, not a sermon. “Stand the best chance” avoids grand claims of enlightenment; it’s probabilistic, not mystical. That matters because “life’s mysteries” can easily drift into self-help fog. Mackay keeps it anchored in psychology: people who “embrace the creative possibilities” of change are practicing a kind of cognitive flexibility - turning disruption into raw material rather than proof of personal failure.

Subtextually, the quote challenges a deep cultural reflex: the idea that stability equals wisdom. It suggests the opposite - that the most fluent guides to life aren’t the ones who stayed on the rails, but the ones who got knocked off and learned to build meaning without a map. The “mysteries” don’t get solved; they get penetrated, a verb that implies effort, risk, and partial access. This is curiosity as survival strategy, not just a personality trait.