.Everything in our life is determined by our questions. I don’t have a clear recollection of the day of my birth, but I’m guessing I arrived with a quizzical look on my face, and if my first word wasn’t ‘why’, I would be very surprised. I remember being a child who wanted to know everything. How does this work; why is the sky blue; what does that mean?
Questions as a child are how we come to create a working model of our reality.
As I grew into teenage-hood my questions changed. Why am I different? I wonder if she likes me? Why is the world so scary. It’s then that we begin to move into the questions of our place in the pack. Why does their family have more money than we do? What am I going to do with my life? The questions come faster, and have deeper meanings, with answers that can shape the future in ways we cannot foresee.
So we ask some questions, and find ways to ignore the ones that scare us.
It seems to me that the shape of my questions have often been determined by the responsibilities that I was under at the time. As a young father, the questions became about providing for my family, how to raise my children, how to get them to sleep through the night? How to balance the demands of graduate school and being a husband?
The answers were harder to find sometimes, as the outcome of the questions had greater weight.
And as life grew more complex, so did the wondering in my mind. Soon there became a realization that I had parts of my soul that were significantly different than I wanted them to be: less functional. Yet I also came to really understand that in some ways my mind was very unique, and if I could only bring all the parts of me together, and make them work in harmony, that I could be somebody very different.
So the questions centered around a desire to make that happen.
But when it doesn’t come to pass in the way that you are expecting, you start to ask very different types of questions, ones that go to the very core of who you think you are. Left alone long enough, the questions form a life of their own, and coalesce into answers that you didn’t necessarily arrive at by yourself. Your whole perception of reality can be brought in for review, shackled to a grimy desk in a dimly light corner of your mind, and everything you thought you knew examined under a microscope.
It’s been said that you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Yet it could also be said that you either die believing who you thought you were, or you live long enough for the universe to disabuse you of that notion. It’s been said that great sculptors can see the statue under all of the stone, and know just how to remove the pieces that don’t belong there. It seems to me sometimes that the universe is asking us to do that to ourselves, but we don’t get a picture or an instruction manual to guide us.
We have to figure ourselves out while trying to sculpt away everything that doesn’t need to be there.
And along the way, we try to decide if what we come up with is any good. I’ve lived long enough to recognize that there are many different layers to my soul, and for reasons that I am still trying to understand, they don’t seem to fit together in the ways that I feel like they should. This itself creates many different questions, not the least of which seems to be ‘what the hell am I really any good at’…
And why is that so important to me?
The second part of that question is actually fairly easy to explain. As someone who grew up in ways that were seemingly less, I answered a lot of the questions of my childhood with statements that made me feel like there was something wrong with me. After all, in fair universe, when something bad happens to you, or when you don’t have something others do, the easiest answer is the one that says that you don’t deserve it. That’s easier to believe than realizing that the universe is not, and never will be, ‘fair’.
So you stack a couple of decades of believing those answers together, and you get yourself a steaming pile of critical self belief.
To survive that you find something, hell anything, to pin your good opinion of yourself on. It’s better if it’s something that seems obvious, yet doesn’t require too much in the way of objective measures, so you can believe it without having to quantify it. But eventually, in its own inimitable way, the universe will find ways to test even those beliefs, grinding you down until you come to a point where you’ll question even the very things that give you a sense of being ‘enough’.
And its then, and only then, that you really come face to face with the truths of your soul.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings