Why “love” questions?
Questions are complicated. They’re messy. They are easy to love in concept, and hard to love in practice. Much like medical practice or yoga practice, having a questioning mindset an imperfect and, at times, painful practice. It makes sense that we are not only trained out of our questioning habits, but we are often hesitant to be the person that asks questions.
Learning Before Resolving
Loving questions means sitting with discomfort. As a born and bred problem solver, I've gotten this wrong - a lot. We are trained day in and day out that we're rewarded for having answers, so it makes sense that when presented with a problem, a question, an inquiry, we jump in to try and answer it. Oftentimes, we'll try and answer a question before it's even fully asked.
There's a reason the buzzers on Jeopardy are programmed to not work until the host is done reading the clue, after all.
In doing this, we end up stepping all over the question itself, and instead rushing headlong into what seems to be an answer.
To love someone, something, or somewhere as they are in that moment, you can't have your first act be one that tries to resolve everything unknown about them.
As one of my more musical friends puts it, you can't try to resolve a chord when you don't even know what key it's in.
Love Is An Active Verb
Questions can be messy. They can be self-referential and assumption-laden. Frustrating, sometimes VERY badly timed, never worded quite right, and seemingly always with a dangling participle or two. Questions are, quite simply, imperfect. And that is the point. They are tools that we can choose to use, not in spite of their imperfection, but because of them. It's the very messiness and complication that encompasses the mess and complication that can be the human experience.
After all, "love" is a verb. It's a choice. It's something that you actively do and embody and express.
As my dad put it when he was asked what the secret to his long marriage was, "when you wake up in the morning and she's there, you deal with it." (Spoken, of course, with a giant smile, knowing grin, and good-humored kiss shared with his wife of nearly five decades.)
Questioning can also be a verb. It's something that is a way of being, a state of mind, a choice and a deliberate action to sit with the mess and talk about the mess and acknowledge the mess and figure out the mess, instead of ignoring it in hopes it'll go away, or forcing it all to a completely inauthentic and frankly almost scary perfectly clean, minimal, and non-existent magazine reality.
Love Is Also A Noun
Love can also be a noun. To show love, or to have love. To ask a question. To have a question. Both of these are places that your mind can go, things that are acted upon, things that take up space and exist as objects, mental or physical, in our sphere of being.
To love a question is to sit with and be with something unresolved.
To question the love is both an awesome rock ballad song title, and a sacred act of inquiry.
Both are uncomfortable. Both create and use space. Both are ways to dive deep. Both are often used only on the surface to try and reinforce the answers that we have already decided on and just want to have confirmed, but could be so much more.
Asking Questions Creates Space
In my mind, asking a question is a sacred act because of the space it creates. When a question is asked, it's a creative act. The act of creating the space and opportunity for yourself, your conversation partner, or whomever hears it, to respond. It also creates the chance to choose how to respond, when to respond, where to respond... the list is almost never-ending.
It's an act of mutual choice that recognizes individuality, agency, and opportunity. In a time when many of us often feel that our choices are limited or constricted, that opening of choice can be freeing -- and, admittedly, frightening.
To ask a question is to open a little crack of possible breathing room in what may have otherwise been an impenetrable wall. To wait and allow a response -- much less an answer -- to make itself known, is to hold space. To hold the contradiction and mess and Schrodinger-level duality and just allow it to be.
Both of these - to create space, and to hold space, are sacred in the true denotative sense. "Worthy of great respect and reverence." That doesn't make them easy, and that doesn't separate them from their real-world consequences. It does remind us that, contrary to our conditioning, it’s OK to take the time we need to be in that space, rather than rush through it.
That is, in large part, what the past 8+ years, thousands of questions, and research rabbit holes have been about for me. Learning that questions are not demands, they are not weapons, they are not disposable, and they are not perfect. And it’s because of this, not in spite of it all, that they should be loved.
