Life in the realm of questions.
When we begin as children, we know little. As we start to grow, we are ‘educated’ in the things of the world, and we form ideas, opinions, concepts and viewpoints.
In our attempt to make sense of the crazy world in which we find ourselves, we take our limited experience, and package it into a nice little worldview that makes us happy in its simple, sincere and singular applications.
As teenagers, we seem to filter out all the truths that would challenge our view of how things ‘are/should be’ and we become the all knowing, all powerful demigods who believe we are omniscient, and express our frustrations with a world that would ‘be much better’ if only it would listen to us. We stand supreme on the sure rock of all that we know about life and its meanings.
And then adulthood begins.
Slowly, time after time, our understanding of the world becomes chipped away, as we thrust forward our theories of how things should be, only to find the sword of our truth blunted on the stone of how things actually are.
Piece by piece, we reach a new understanding with this experience we call reality, and we come to understand that we really know very little.
Then, in humility and often in painful circumstances, the learning really begins.
It has been said before that in life we take the test, and then learn the material afterwards, but I believe life is less forgiving than that. I believe that we take the test, and then life allows us time to try to figure out what the questions actually were.
All of us seek for answers, because we like to feel that we are on the ‘right path’, but in my 47 years I have come to believe that the path is really a continuum of continual questions. For each answer spawns new questions, each solution is a single expression of a spectrum and every certainty is the gateway to a new unreality.
My role is to get comfortable with having questions.
If you find yourself struggling in a sea of uncertainty, I invite you today to accept that you will never know all of the answers. The very wisest people I know are those who know a few things, and are willing to discover new questions to guide them along their path.
If you have questions, it means you are moving, and this is a very good thing.
Author’s note: I have found in the past that when I really struggle to write a reflection, it means that someone needed this message specifically. I don’t know who you are, but this one took almost 2 hours to finally appear, so I hope it helps you to know that you are not alone in your universe of questions.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings