Right now, I would say that 2020 is asking us a lot of questions. What are our priorities? Is how we go about our way of life really working? Do we have the right systems in place? What/who do we really miss during quarantine? What do we need to feel safe and secure? Are we really tolerant? Do we really have any control? What needs to be changed? What needs to be valued? Can we work together on a global basis? Are we good at taking care of ourselves and others? Do we have faith? What sustains us? Are we stronger than we once thought? Have our stances on political issues changed or gotten stronger? . . . . . . . the list goes on and on.
When you start thinking about the questions, it gets overwhelming doesn’t it? In my almost 50 years of life, the previous years that brought me to my knees with questions, were good. They forced me to reevaluate a lot of things. The questioning years compelled me to stop my frenetic energy enough, to make sure that I was headed in the right direction for me. The questioning years forced me to do some serious contemplation. What I found in previous questioning years, (and so, I suspect that it will the same for 2020) is that the answers are more likely to come, when one gets comfortable with just sitting with the questions. When I was most relaxed about just letting the questions “float” out there, the answers tended to come organically, in the most interesting and surprising of ways. Sometimes, I would realize that I was now living “the answer” to my questions, without even being able to pinpoint when the answer actually came. Retrospectively, when I relaxed into living the unknown, the answers kind of just “free floated” in.
There will always be questions in life and the answers can change over time and even more so, a lot of mystery will always remain, but some years do seem to bring about a bigger storm of questions than usual. To make peace with the questioning years, I like Einstein’s take on questioning:
And I think that Tennessee Williams helps us to make peace with mystery, by reminding us of the virtue of the mystery of Life:
