I had the opportunity to visit a few area museums recently. A day at the museum is a great way to stimulate your curiosity or to satisfy it.

Wandering through the exhibits can bring up thoughts you don’t typically think about or can answer questions you’ve often wondered about.

At the Field Museum, I like walking through the Maori meetinghouse. The structure was built in 1881 and was brought over from New Zealand.

I also like checking out the skeletons of dinosaurs. I’ll find myself thinking about how a tyrannosaurus ate, how it walked, how it fought, and how it adapted (or didn’t) over time.

At the Shedd Aquarium, like the groups of junior high children on field trips, I’ll stare at the underwater serpents that occupy individual tanks and marvel at the larger environments that are replicated.

They have a Caribbean Reef display and a 3 million gallon Oceanarium that simulates the marine life of the Pacific Northwest. In visiting the Shedd, you have the chance to visit the Seven Seas — all in one place.

It’s easy to lose track of time at the Museum Of Science and Industry. It may be the most impressive science museum in the world. It’s a great place for anyone interested in how things in the physical world work.

Even on days when the museum is crowded, earphones and buttons that respond to personal prompts make the learning experience very personalized and very interactive. They also have amazing exhibits that you can walk through.

You can ride down a coal elevator and see how coal is extracted from the earth (a permanent exhibit since 1933). The museum also houses a World War II German submarine that was retrieved from the Atlantic.

There are exhibits about green energy and weather (You can actually see how a tsunami forms under water), and a wonderful exhibit about how humans develop – physically and personality-wise. The space center has replicas of Apollo capsules and regularly shows 3-D movies.

My favorite exhibit at the MSI, though, is the model train in the main rotunda. Twenty trains travel on over 1400 feet of track through constructed landscapes representing the Great Plains and the Rockies. The level of detail is incredible. Trains go over bridges, through mountains, past signals, and even switch tracks.

I could stare at the trains moving along their routes for ages. I especially like when a train picks up speed and then disappears into a tunnel burrowed into the side of a mountain. I’ll often hold my breath when the front car vanishes from view until it re-emerges into the light.

I guess I’m more interested in the unseen than in easily observed phenomena. It seems that there are things we know to be true, but we can’t always explain why, or we can’t be sure someone else shares the same understanding.

I wish there was a Museum of Metaphysics and Experiential Understanding (MMEU). I wish there were simple interactive exercises so people could fully take in the Law of Attraction or Law of Cause and Effect.

Maybe life itself is like a day at the MMEU, although it would be nice if we learned more about how the universe operates as children and didn’t spend so much of our lives unlearning limiting beliefs.

Every exhibit in every museum I’ve ever visited had something to teach me, but I especially love the lesson of the model train. Even though I’ve seen it dozens of times, the lesson always seems to be timely.

I love watching the train disappear into the side of the mountain, content knowing that even though I can’t see its progress along the track, it will come out of the tunnel at the right time.

Like going through any transition in life, understanding that darkness is only temporary is no small thing.