The Query and the Question

Happy Q Day everyone. Still hanging in there with your quarantine survival, and your A-to-Z quest? I think we’re over the hump on both counts. Let’s renew our commitment and tackle that home stretch, eh?

So today’s assignment hails from the quiet, inquisitive, quick-thinking, quotable, master program facilitator; a gentleman and musician of the highest order; Mister Quickfingers on the guitar; the Soul Man. And he offers this:

Questions  

Yesterday I asked a dangerous question.

As a creative person you come up with original ideas. We must remember that originality is the act of integral creation. It lies in the process, not in the arbitrary matter of uniqueness.

We are tempted to turn to that Great and Powerful Oracle known as Google to plug in our creation and see if anyone has done it before us. Not a great idea. With 7-billion-plus on the planet there is an awful good chance that someone has, and knowing so is such an irrelevant downer.

But yesterday I dared. It wasn’t a big deal after all; a shallow matter; just a silly word. I googled Pandamondayum…

… and got lucky! And now at the other end of the depth chart:

While writing had been a robust daily habit and one which had grown very deep in its ambition, as I stared at a blank page for long long periods searching for the most illusive beast of all; the beast called truth, I asked myself deeper and deeper questions and finally: Am I evil?

Of course there would never be a real yes or no answer to that. There are so many contexts and ways to define evil. And ultimately, evil is not a real thing in the universe. It is a human idea. But though there would never be a lasting meaningful yes or no answer, it was almost surely the most important question I ever asked in my life. It lead me into a new area of intense examination, one in which I found more courage than at any other time in my life, and one that set off a chain of effects that changed my life vastly and completely.

Asking Am I evil led me to deep understandings of how immensely terrible and how immensely special I was, and eventually the same such observations in people around me. And it was only then that I seemed to find myself. After I seemed to lose the world, and all my ambitions, and then got the world back again but looking completely different. Only then did I find my place in it. I’m pretty sure that’s what finding yourself means: finding your place. And though I may, in some ways, have lost it again; myself; my place, I know the experience was real because I still benefit from so much of that journey.

What Soul Man had replied to me, with regards to a Q assignment, was “Questions; not to feed our need for answers, but to feed our need for understanding." 

How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people--Lamentations 1:1