Finding questions vs. finding answers
Last week, my LeadWise classmate Ian talked about the importance, not of finding answers, but of finding the right questions to ask. Finding questions can be much harder, and it’s a process I learned about myself several years ago.
Every few years, I go to the Burning Man art festival. It’s a surreal annual gathering of tens of thousands of artists, hippies, anarchists, and countless others, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For one week, this remote corner of a barren plain becomes the fifth largest city in the state; a week later, it’s gone without a trace.
The desert is a blank slate for people to build an experimental and ephemeral society according to their whims, and many people find the event powerfully inspirational, or even transformational. People’s enthusiasm for it can be extreme, and I do like to good-naturedly poke fun at the large numbers of people who rant about the “life-changing” experience they had — but the truth is, my experiences there have been instrumental in my own journey of self-discovery, often in very subtle and indirect ways that I only realize much later.
One thing I can always count on at Burning Man is finding questions. I rarely find answers there — that’s something I might work on the other 51 weeks of the year, and that’s when the personal growth appears to happen — but those answers are simply the end of a process that started deep in the Black Rock desert. The truth is, by the time I get home from that ephemeral city, I usually find that I’ve started to question something in my life that I previously took for granted.
To be honest, finding questions is not a lot of fun. It’s stressful and frustrating. A lot of people see Burning Man as merely a huge party, and I certainly do have a lot of fun while I’m there. But for me, it’s a sort of spiritual roller coaster. Alongside the euphoria and awe, the highest emotional highs of the year, I also face the lowest of lows. Out in that desert — tired, dehydrated, hungry and sleep deprived, where I can take nothing for granted and even the most basic tasks like brushing my teeth become a tedious chore — I struggle through feelings of isolation and loneliness; I face dashed hopes and unfulfilled expectations; I marvel at the immensity of the chasm between my life as it is, and as I wish it to be. I find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about my life and myself, and some of those questions linger long after I come home.
Which brings me to today. Signing up for the LeadWise course, I was at a point in my life where the questions had been piling up for some time, and I wasn’t sure where to look for the answers I needed. It turns out that this class has been a great place to find answers! Every week, I find new insights into challenges I face, both personally and professionally.
Wrapping my head around all this new information has been incredibly difficult, and has taken a lot more of my time and attention than I expected. It’s hard work — but finding answers is a lot more satisfying than finding questions, and it feeds my optimism and motivates me to take risks and try harder, driven by the newfound confidence that the direction I’m moving in is right for me.
