Brain Food #815: Eventually, the answers will come
Sitting with the questions
Thoughts of the day
In a recurring act of synchronicity, a question I return to often is that of questions themselves. Writer Ralph B. Smith suggested that children ask roughly 125 questions per day, adults only 6. We often prefer to provide answers, to the questions posed to us by the demands of daily life. When children ask questions, they are trying to understand the world. Perhaps, as adults, we ask fewer questions, because we want to try and avoid accepting it.
Sometimes, before jumping to the answers, we should focus on discovering the right questions, the ones that matter to us, that we are truly trying to answer. Asking the right questions is a form of art that can unlock insights, revelations, relationships.
James Baldwin wrote about the uncomfortable questions, the ones we can discover through the act of writing, or some other means of exploring our psyche:
“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
Idleness can be helpful, creating moments in which the questions percolate and come to the surface. The questions, or problems, that seem the most unsolvable, are the ones we should sit with the most. Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
I have also been thinking about our need for closure, and whether attaining closure is an illusion. We dislike ambiguity; thus every situation that does not have a satisfying resolution will leave us desiring something more, a concrete outcome or interpretation.
But the need for closure is, in fact, a set of questions, and questions can open the door to discovering a set of answers, not about a situation specifically, but about ourselves.
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to his curious correspondent:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
We will leave this world with more questions than answers. But when we remember to ask questions of the world, and are encountered with silence, as if we are staring into the abyss, the most difficult ones, the most unexplainable ones, are the ones worth holding onto the most. We might still be somewhere between the first and the fifty-fifth minute but, eventually, the answers will come.
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