Questions or Answers

Which one is more important? 

Which method do you prefer? To follow a road map with GPS or taking a drive without a destination in mind?

Our answer determines our preference for certainty or exploration. We are either in love with our illusion of control or we can take life as it comes.

Answers come from the world of knowing and certainty. Questions explore the unknown with no attachment to outcomes.

Questions give meaning and direction to our actions.

Before we take action, we often begin with a question. Where shall I go today? We start to problem solve and potential answers flow.

This is where things get interesting. Certainty seekers are content with the answers they find. Life explorers only find answers spur more questions. No one answer will ever satisfies their urge to ask more questions.

Pursuing unanswered questions is not a search of answers; it’s a journey into the unknown and unexpected; it’s a way of finding our questions of meaning.

Today’s answers will only serve today’s questions.

Answers are not as important as we think they are. They may give us piece of mind and drive our immediate decision-making actions, but they will likely have no value tomorrow as we uncover more questions and different answers.

We were not born to search for answers. Answers assert that something is concrete, fact, and permanent. Life is anything but that. Answers serve as guide posts for future exploration. The only definitive answer I’ve found is there will always be more questions.

Knowing the answer means we are not asking enough questions.

Having an answer does us no good if we do not have context about why it is important to us. Without context, we have no meaning or cause for action. Call it, uninspired meandering.

All growth, innovation, creativity, epiphanies, etc. come from asking a questions of contextual meaning.

Questions have a way of evolving once we begin to explore them. New ones will form once we strip away our old framework of being addicted to answers. Behind every question is another more powerful question we cannot immediately see.

Say yes to questions and no to your answer addiction.

When asked a question, what is your first response? I’ll bet it is to try to give an answer. What if instead of doing that, we said “I don’t know” and dug deeper into the question. We might discover the original question no longer serves the conversation. In fact, we might learn something entirely different from we set out to.

We need to get in the practice of sitting with and exploring our questions. We must try to embody the experience. The wisdom and knowledge we want will come from this exploratory journey.

Write your questions down. Find their true meaning. Strike up conversations with others about them. Ask what questions they are sitting with? Discover the new possibilities they hold for you. Become a question explorer.

What questions do you have? What question(s) are driving your actions?