Know your eternal questions

Your fears and fascinations share the same source

Schools teach children to expect solutions in the final pages, but everything outside a textbook creates more questions than answers. There are no tidy conclusions between the chapters of your monograph. Seek not the answer section. To propel the story forward, you must know your eternal questions.

After a party: one friend dissects the social dynamics, another maps the flow of conversations, a third recaps the menu. Not everyone is curious about the same things, but everyone is pulled by questions they can't help but ask. These curiosities are different for everyone. They drive you imperceptibly. They are the grooves you slip into. They also reveal the paths you tend to avoid.

The opposite of curiosity is fear. Fear builds walls made of untested assumptions. This becomes a model of the world you consider safer than reality. Fears are also linked to deep questions, but you assume the answers will hurt you. And since you associate pain with death, you stop asking.

Fears are different for everyone too. Your playground is another person's taboo. Questions are simply what you do not know. Eternal questions are things you can never fully know. This is why you keep asking them.

You get to choose how you orient to uncertainty. You are either someone worthy of discovering answers or someone too brittle to even ask.