Hard questions
A Voice From I Don’t Know Where
It seems you love this world very much.
“Yes, I said. “This beautiful world.”
And you don’t mind the mind, that keeps you
busy all the time with its dark and bright wonderings?
“No, I’m quite used to it. Busy, busy,
all the time.”
And you don’t mind living with those questions,
I mean the hard ones, that no one can answer?
“Actually, they’re the most interesting.”
And you have a person in your life whose hand
you like to hold?
“Yes, I do.”
It must surely, then, be very happy down there
in your heart.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
– Mary Oliver in Felicity, 2015 –Perhaps the poem is a bit obvious, but it resonates with my inclination, bordering sometimes on fanaticism, to ask the insuperable question.
And (to me at least) the obvious ones are still worth asking:
Why are we here?
It’s conjecture (of course), but I’m a lone voice or at least a rarity in these information-saturated, finger-wagging times. (Why everyone wants to dole out unsolicited “advice” is a mystery to me.) Weave into the mythos the tsunami of AI proclamations, and you can see why no one is enamoured with imprecision, lest still to be stumped with the diamond-hard question.
My inclination is also aided and abetted by spiritual enquiry, namely:
Who am I?
Actually, I’ve moved on from that and these days accept, not evidentially that is, that the whole shebang is a complete mystery, i.e. there is no way of describing any of this. That doesn’t mean I’m an atheist or agnostic; it’s more a case of staying open to the ineffable, the unknown and to be comfortable being all of me — however discomforting that might be for others.
I do wonder though why asking a half-decent question appears to have gone out of fashion? Is it because we’re not very serious people, now? Or is it because no one has the time to think about the question, let alone articulate a credible response? Or to put it more colloquially, they can’t be arsed?
Perhaps it’s because we feel we don’t need to ask any hard questions. Life’s for living, right! Then again, if all we do is fall under the spell of the dominant narrative, what then? We play by someone else’s Rulebook and we accept that if we do so dutifully, ardently and sincerely, that we too can reach the promised land.
Sorry, that sounds sententious but if I needed to prove my point, and I’ve no desire to get on my soapbox again, I only have to start picking away the work vs. life paradigm to adumbrate, evidentially, that no one appears remotely interested in discussing, let alone challenging the status quo for fear (I suspect) of ending up on the scrapheap of life. To put it another way, I will constantly ask: What is your work? Which is usually met with a quizzical gaze or a moan of consternation. Ipso facto the work (i.e. my job) is the work. Really?, which is code for saying I’m not convinced.
In the end, I don’t expect anything to change; we’ll continue to follow a well-worn path because (largely) there is noting else on offer that we think worthy of our time, but perhaps in extremis or we get up close with death, grief and endings, we might begin to realise that to wonder over a question is at least the starting point to this thing we call “life”.
Not our life, but all of life.
Enjoy your day.
Blessings,
Julian