A Buddhist teacher once nudged me along the path by rephrasing a question my mind kept posing to itself. Who am I? my question repeated, but with the sage’s input, became What am I? This wasn’t an entirely different question, but it led in a completely different direction and even provided an answer of its own, however unsettling. This tiny shift moved me from an ultimately unanswerable question to a humbler, more psychologized inquiry into just who, or more accurately, what, lives in this head of mine. And, most importantly, the reframing taught me the importance of asking the biggest questions I can.
The reworked question is especially daunting, because it’s potentially answerable. I’ve not yet discovered a satisfactory or enduring response and take relief in realizing I may never. But I appreciate that adjectives and verbs lend themselves more readily as answers to the What question than to the Who. In response to What: I am that which formulates the question, I am open to new experience, I am what lives into the questions I ask. Responses feel less absolute than in response to Who: I am a facilitator, I used to be an activist, I am a teacher. What am I makes room for evolution and mystery. Who am I denies transmutation and complexity.
As a child, I liked to ponder the question What is the meaning of life? but as I grew into adulthood, I realized the futility of the question and took my cue from Victor Frankl, whose insight into the question of life’s meaning is packaged in a tidy inversion:
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is hewho is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering forhis own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (p. 113-114).
And yet, as true and forceful as that seems, it feels incomplete. If we are to answer for our own lives, then we should identify where our questions come from. They come from nowhere if not within. From an everlasting negotiation of outer world with inner spirit. From the passing of time and the staleness that repetition brings. From our intolerance at long last of comportment and conformity. And from a lurking suspicion that timidity and careful planning won’t deliver us at last from doubt over to meaning.
Elie Wiesel, fellow traveler to Frankl through the concentration camps, retells an instruction he received earlier in life from his own teacher in the humbling ways of mystical inquiry:
“’Man raises himself towards God by the questions he asks Him,’, he was fond of repeating. ‘That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand His answers. We can’t understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!’” (p. 15)
This response, likewise true and forceful, feels more complete. The questions arise from within and move us towards their target. Weisel’s God, my mystery, your sacred. Questions are arrows launched from a bow whose power springs from polar ends forever held in tension. And these arrows are met midway by divine arrows that respond and speed forth from the complementary wholeness that resides in “the depths of the soul” (Wiesel, p. 15). Questions intersecting answers, answers bisecting back into questions.
For my part, the biggest question I am asking of life is as simple as its misguided insistence on Who over Whatis obvious:
Who am I in relation to my fellow human beings beyond the conflicting dualism that reigns in our markets, minds, and politics? What am I…in service to?
That is, if I am a force for resolution that comes from the inverted perspective that a more whole, complementary dualism makes possible, what do I owe my fellow human beings? Nothing? Everything? I honestly don’t know. I recently found an answer through a serendipitous sequence that began with formulating my question, even if what I found is not my answer. Peter Block writes in his latest book:
“Most ways of engaging citizens are cause-oriented gatherings and promotions. Progressive news sites. Events designed to convince and persuade and educate. […] These are the forms in which dominant change is attempted. […] Traditional forms of activism that enlist, recruit, inspire, and pressure others to change are variations of a marketing strategy” (p. xviii).
As much as I want my answer to my question, I see in Block’s framework something of what I am not. More precisely, and in the words of Paul Simon, “I’m not a mastermind with a genius marketing plan.” The questioning I can only know itself at times by clearly seeing what is not-I, which I believe relates closely to a not knowing. The biggest questions have a way of dropping us at the edge of our understanding where the order we assembled fails us and the chaos we are listening into reminds us of how little we actually know about anything.
TS Eliot eloquently describes something similar:
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not
And what you do not know is the only thing you know (Section III, lines 142-144)
The biggest questions we can ask, thus, promise a knowledge of not knowing that catalyzes the unfolding of self in a given and more meaningful direction. Its promise is that arriving wherever the questions lead, perhaps especially at not knowing, is conducive to the self’s further unfolding.
The biggest question I can ask, then, is the one that moves me closer “to the point of equipoise between the binaries where the balancing of the polarities liberates energy” that we typically burn up keeping the opposites apart (Hoeller, p. 98-99). If I’m not this yet neither am I that, then I have no choice but to embrace this unknown and mostly unwelcome thing that promises no way out of the conundrum I find myself in. It is only from here, amid the not knowing that comes from rejecting the earlier way of favoring a given side, that my hope for an answer lies. Something here slumbers, it awaits the quietest voice of all to bring forth the irrational response that reconciles the opposites I all too often am. In the meantime, I ask small questions, I get small answers, I ask bigger questions, I get bigger answers, and I ask the biggest question, and I get silence. There are worse bargains I could make.
What questions are you asking of life?
Where is the wellspring of your questions?
What answers are you getting?
What’s the biggest question you can ask right now?
And what is the silence telling you?
References:
Block, P. (2024). Activating the Common Good: Reclaiming Control of our Collective Well-Being. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Eliot, TS. (1971). East Coker. Four Quartets. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Frankl, V. (1992). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (4th ed.). Beacon Press.
Simon, P. (2006). Wartime Prayers [Song]. On Surprise [Album]. Warner Bros. Records.
Wiesel, E. (1985). Night [The Night Trilogy]. Hill and Wang.
