A Few Questions Before We Begin (Again)

Morning Thoughts #31

Oh Lord, I pray that I am able to formulate honest questions. And why do I pray for this? What am I really asking?

Is it better to sacrifice unbounded potential for specific actualities that are ultimately arbitrary? Or is it wiser to remain untethered and eternally open to doing more and better, even if doing more and better is just an abstract idea? Is it presumptuous to attempt to walk up trail-less mountains without guides? Or is it better to be more pragmatic, to hire guides claiming to know the way, but whose proof of that fact is not entirely convincing? And is this last concern solved by vetting and interviewing and picking through the resumes of all potential guides until you have found the perfect one? Should you read the best books of philosophy and inspiring biographies as if you were a kind of dedicated hiring manager, searching for the recipe for greatness? Does the recipe for greatness only produce edible meals when prepared by rare and great chefs? When someone advises me to use a microwave on my life, do I listen? What if the world of today has designed me to be prepared that way?

Where does the history lover go when the glory of the past seems to outshine all possibilities and potentialities? Or is this just restating the question of potentiality versus actuality? The statue past versus the creative future? Is it always like this, that the more we study our position, the less certain we feel of it and where it leads? I do not want to accept what is beneath me, but how can I even be sure that I am not already upside down? That the offer coming from what seems to be below is actually something descending, in all humility, to greet the likes of me? As once there were cavemen, am I now a cageman? Is feeling trapped better than the alternative? Is there only merit in spending time outside of one's shelter only when one’s shelter exists at all?

At the risk of living an inauthentic life, why be Camus' stranger? Is being fatalistic the easier alternative or just the wiser and more humble one? Free will or fate is the question so often asked, but maybe there's another option? Perhaps the third possibility is intuition? Not to place full trust in one's own conscious scheming but also rejecting the absolute rule of blind universal chance? When seeking a guide, maybe it is best to hire internally? A new policy of no more promoting from outside? Once captured, the experiences, lessons, and profundity of the world may just have to rise within you like everything else? A model of organic growth where even if my intuition reports to me, I make sure not to ever micromanage it?

How do you tell the difference from when you’re running away from challenges and when you’re wisely bypassing needless entanglements? Do we sometimes say, “Oh how good it was that I drove through a muddy ditch, how much I learned from a 7-hour delay, dirty clothes, and a lot of fruitless pushing and grunting?” What is growth, and what is mud? And even more difficult, what if, while stuck in mud, you drop a few seeds, and something grows from these annoying delays in life? If we approach things right, are we always dropping ripe fruit? But are there not better and worse climates for our particular kind of trees? How can this not be?

At what point does it become too late to take great risks that might result in great paths? Once the youthful era of potentiality passes, is playing it safe a sign of mature wisdom and honest adulthood? Are we too apt to hire as guides those whose paths to success are the least probable? And not just we, but culturally, are improbable paths overreported to an extent that they have greatest reach? And so cause many needless hiking accidents? The greatest stories but not the greatest lessons? Is it that exceptions should be advertised as such? But even knowing this fact, how could it dissuade the real seekers? To be a real seeker, isn't that to assume oneself to be an exception? To assume that life itself is worthy of a question, of many questions, aren't we giving it much admiration? To be a single conscious being is not to be an exception, but to also be conscious that of all the billions of single conscious beings you are in fact the one you are, isn't this the beginning of the understanding of exceptionality?

So many questions that I do not have answers to! But isn't it kind of refreshing to allow yourself to just ask questions sometimes? A question followed by a question followed by a question until you tire yourself out to a kind of peaceful silence? Is that all I'm doing here? Or could I be questioning myself right up a mountain? Look at the shape of a "?". Does this look like a kind of ascent and then an aborted attempt at descent down the other side? Maybe there's wisdom in not articulating an answer, in not making that final descent? Or maybe just not yet?