Hi Friends
So I’ve become increasingly suspicious of people confidently touting answers. And this is not because answers aren’t useful, they are. Sure, certain answers build bridges, cure diseases, fix leaking taps and get us home when we’re lost.
But not all things are answerable with any degree of certainty. We are applying answers as facts in places where I don’t think they belong. The most important things in my life have never arrived as answers. They arrived as questions. In the very word question is the word quest. Questions show what we are questing for.
I have talked about this before, but I want to go deeper, I think there is something very rich for humanity in questioning our questions.
Questions seem to possess a strange power. Ask a good one and suddenly the world reorganises itself around it.
When you decide to buy a red car, you start seeing red cars everywhere. When you’re pregnant, babies appear to multiply across the planet.
When you ask, “What is sacred?” something similar happens. Your attention begins searching.
Not in a frantic way like we might search for lost keys, but more like how a sunflower searches for light.
Modern neuroscience tells us that our brains are prediction machines. Every second they are filtering vast amounts of information, deciding what matters and what doesn’t. Most of reality passes us by unnoticed, or unwitnessed by our conscious inner eye.
Questions change the filter. They tell our minds what to look for.
Ask “What’s wrong with the world?” and evidence appears everywhere. Ask “Who’s to blame?” and your mind happily supplies suspects. Ask “What is sacred?” and suddenly sacredness begins leaking through the cracks of your ordinary life.
A child’s hand reaching for yours. The hush before dawn. The warmth of the sun’s rays and the way it casts light through the gobo created by a tree’s leaves. The kindness of a stranger. The extraordinary fact that anything exists at all. The question becomes a tuning fork. A way of bringing certain frequencies of reality into focus.
Which makes me wonder whether the quality of our lives is shaped less by the answers we possess and more by the questions we carry.
Questions don’t merely reveal reality. They participate in creating it, and shaping it. They direct our attention. Shape our perception. Influence what we notice, value and ultimately who we become.
And perhaps nowhere is this more important than when it comes to hope. Many people think hope is a feeling that radiates off something external - hope.
Others think it’s optimism. A prediction that things will probably work out.
But I wonder if hope might be something much simpler.
A question.
Not “Will everything be okay?” But: “What remains possible?” “What wants to emerge here?” “What can still be tended?”
“What future is trying to be born?”
Hope is what happens when we refuse to close the inquiry.
When the evidence is bleak and the horizon uncertain, hope does not demand certainty.
It asks another question. And then another. And then another.
A question opens space. A declaration closes it.
Questions keep the future alive. Perhaps this is why despair often feels so final. It convinces us the story is already over. The verdict has been delivered. Nothing new can enter.
Hope leaves the door ajar. Just enough for possibility to slip through. Not certainty. Not guarantees: but possibility.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find definitive answers to the questions that matter most.
What is sacred? What is enough? What is a good life? What is the future is asking from my participation? What is the most authentic expression of myself? How can I be of inextricable value to this world?
But I’ve come to suspect that finding the answer was never the point.
The point was becoming the sort of person willing to keep asking. And in the asking, discovering that the world is far more alive, mysterious and hungry for my participation, my questions, than I ever imagined.
I’m sending you big love. What a time to be alive.
There are so many of us, waking up, showing up, speaking up. It is up to join up the dots, and call it a revolution.
See you next week. x Megan
