Howdy,
Do you know the answer to a/maybe-even-the question?
A question is the answer.
This isn’t going to be a long post (I don’t think), because this is an idea that I want to explore and develop further later. In fact, I’m kind of bummed that I’ve already written too much. What I wanted to put up for today’s post was simply and solely:
A question is the answer.
Of course that’s no-where near the whole story, so I had a hard time (having the guts) to just post a question is the answer, and shut the lid of my laptop, like dropping the mic. (But that is why I at least inserted my website’s “Read More” tag right after the first “a question is the answer”—brave of me, right? Courageous. Take heart, all you who ever doubt, and jump into the wild sea of risk or leap into the expanse of sky without regard for gravity and its dominant lifetime record. Quite a winning percentage, gravity. Thinking like a coach. I heard something in a song this morning that seems applicable here—in fact I’ve probably written this ramble to include sky because I just recently heard that, so you can blame my iPod and my actually getting a workout in today. From Smalltown Poets, “Inside the Bubble”: “Why are those who are on the ground / Afraid of falling down?”)
Another in fact, I didn’t even like my choice for the title, but not because I thought a better selection was imminent, but because I only wanted a question is the answer for this post and that seemed like the most sensible title, but I didn’t want to entitle the post with that because it’d give the whole thing away and the whole body of the entry would only be a simple (but oh-so profound, right?) repetition of the title. That didn’t feel like a good option, so I had to come up with something different that a question is the answer, and pretty much anything on topic would do as well as another—all things secondary to the only line that I couldn’t use as the title or let sit in its own surrounding silence: an answer circled in hovering question marks, hanging low and ripe for any occasion, malleable and ubiquitously applicable.
Yet leaving a question is the answer all alone proved impossible, feeling irresponsible, especially with the notion that a question could maybe even be the answer to the question. That would need an explanation, which right now I am only suggesting a specific question that an individual person might ask you directly and NOT taking on what THE ultimate question of existence is—though I would suspect and offer that asking some good questions would be a great place to start honing in on important things, even the most important.
If I where to merely tell you what that/those were, I wouldn’t be following my advice to employ the boring drill bit to answers: asking questions.
There’s so much more to this, which is why I feel like I still have the exploration ahead of me even as I type and seek to explain some here now. But let’s at least take a beat to look at this aspect: have you ever noticed how even a well-reasoned, logically-tight, indefeasible, undefeatable answer can fail to answer a question, fail to move a person a tick closer to its truth?
In that situation, with that person, it seems the answer, if there is one at that pinpoint on that person’s mapped timeline of life, is a question.
A question is the answer.
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
P.S. Here’s a good question that holds an answer: “Why are those who are on the ground / Afraid of falling down?” I—and I naturally wanted to write “we” to include my podcasting partner, Matt Garman—talk often about Jon Acuff’s stance on anonymity being a strength and tool for jumping into “risky” creativity without fear of letting down an attentive audience or seeing a flop as personally falling down. My anonymity—though maybe we don’t want this forever—makes my crashing in the forest silent and soft, unheard and unhurt I can get back up, feet solidly planted in the rich soil of the ground and I can, without fear, jump again into the wild, dark sea of anonymity (and—I cannot help but write this—drowning in the noise of others. [But I do it in fun, because I can, because I, yours truly, am anonymous of sorts and have established a certain other sort of lack of disciple at the keyboard, which I’ll likely keep until the hollering others out there start yelling at me. That is a sad day that I look forward to, the day when I will no doubt look wistfully back onto today, this very day, blessed by anonymity.]).
P.P.S. It turns out this was NOT not a long post, as you no doubt have discovered for yourself—and I thank you for that. (Hey, at least it wasn’t still about camping again.)
Word Count: 150,191 / On Pace: 154,550 / Year’s Goal: 200,000
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