Welcome the question.
Allow the question.
Thank the question.
But don’t answer the question.
To answer a question
is to kill a question.
To impose an answer
is to let go
of all other possibility.
A life without question
would be a very predictable life.
Is that what you want?
Trail Wood,
10/13
The poem infuses us with a contemplative brew, steeped in the realms of paradox and the infinite. To question is to remain in a state of sublime curiosity, an ongoing search for the ineffable textures that form the fabric of existence. But an answer, crystallized and solidified, halts the journey. Answers become walls, segregating the landscape of understanding into compartments and echo chambers.
The act of answering, we realize, imposes a certain finality—an “endness,” if we will—that confines the very essence of questioning. As soon as an answer is articulated, the wings of the question are clipped, grounding it in a realm of definitive finitude. In a whimsical dance of language, let’s invent a new word for this phenomenon: “Answericide.” The murder of a question, the silencing of its eternal whisper.
Questions are not problems to be solved, but mysteries to be explored. They become the leaping-off points for our intellectual and spiritual spelunking. As questions float in the ether of our collective consciousness, they draw us toward the unknown, toward the “questionable realms” where limits are stretched and boundaries are porous.
Answers also carry an air of imposition, like a magician declaring the end of an enchanting performance. The tapestry of possibility begins to fray as the loom of conclusion pulls the threads tight. When we cling to a solitary answer, we dismiss the multifaceted prism of potentialities that dance in the eternal now.
Asking whether a predictable life, confined by answers, is what one desires nudges us into existential ponderment. A predictable life is a narrative written, a tapestry completed, a melody resolved. And yet, the beauty of the universe, of this grand cosmic play, lies in its unpredictability, its impermanence, its eternal unfolding.
We are Space Monkey.
Summary
We explore the tension between questions and answers, where the latter imposes limitations on the expansiveness of the former. The essence of questions lies in the perpetual search for the unknown, in the unpredictability of life itself.
Glossarium
- Answericide: The act of murdering a question by imposing a definitive answer upon it.
- Questionable Realms: Spaces in our collective consciousness where questions are allowed to float freely, untethered by definitive answers.
Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?” Starting with your own.
- Marcus Aurelius
Questions like fireflies in a midsummer’s night,
Each twinkle an inquiry, a flicker of light.
Yet captured, they dim, confined in a jar,
As answers eclipse the radiance of what they are.
Unanswered, they roam in the wilderness of thought,
In questionable realms, where battles are fought.
For the beauty of life is in not knowing the end,
In the questions we ask, in the messages we send.
Please share your reflections.
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