ON QUESTIONS AND
ANSWERS: Growing up with unanswered questions.
I am filled with
questions. I am overwhelmed, bushwhacked and waylaid by the need to know and
the necessity of finding out about things. The need to know and the endless
questions it brings forth is not a mere artifact of mental infancy- clearly-
but something primal and inborn. It seems to me that the older I get, the more
questions I have. At this age, with university a couple of years behind me and
my days well ensconced in my working life, I thought I would have run out of questions
to ask and found answers for the more important questions in my life. That hasn’t
happened. But was it supposed to? I don’t really know. That itself brings on
another question that requires an answer.
I now believe- I
have no certainty of it- that the majority of adults start ignoring most of the
questions they had asked themselves growing up and tend to “settle down” into
the routine of daily life, because they fear they will not find the answers to
the questions buzzing in the back of their minds. That we keep innate curiosity
and our sense of wonder locked up in the basement drawer of our minds, so that
we can live responsible adult lives is a necessity for most of us, I suppose. Questions like “Who am I? Why am I here on
this planet? What is love? What is the meaning of life? What is life? Etcetera,
tend to dissipate like smoke when we are faced with the tyranny and the immediacy
of a tax payment or the menacing regularity of credit card bills. My point in
all this is that some of us still ask endless questions even as adults and
needed the answers “like” yesterday! I am one of these irresponsible adults.
Let’s call them- The askers.
I am certain about
one difference between my childhood and adulthood. When I was a child, the
world seemed bigger, people were taller, buildings were huge, trains were
monstrous, Ice cream tasted better, monsters stayed in the shadows and one
lurked under the bed and all my questions were simpler. As an adult, the world
seems more manageable, people are shorter or taller than me and I don’t care
anymore, buildings aren’t that impressive anymore, trains look like trains, Ice
cream taste like shit, and it takes much more imagination to “see” monsters in
the shadows or hear one of them breathing under your bed. It is easier to get
the proportions right, measure the relative sizes of things and find out about
the world through observation. Yet! Though the nature of the questions have
changed, perhaps because I have changed, the endless questions remain and the
greatest difference between my questions then and the ones now is that I don’t
have answers anymore- Just questions.
