The Questions Are Important

So many of us long to find the answers to our questions. We want to know right now. Yet, the need to take action prematurely can cause us to miss magnificent opportunities for growth and depth in our development. In a book I recently read, Fearless Creating, author Eric Maisel states that any work of art requires a period of anxiousness. In the following excerpt he talks about this process related to art, but the process can be applied to any major creative dilemma in life. He states:

“In order to bind the anxiety that naturally arises when one doesn’t know, an artist may determine to know anyway. The landscape before her is not held as a fantastic problem or a great mystery; instead, she knows what to do. She knows that if she puts down a wash like this and twists her brush like that, decent bushes will appear in the foreground. One sure way of binding anxiety is reflected in this knowing.

“But the artist who is more interested in creating deeply than in ridding herself of anxiety will refuse to know too soon. She will remain with doubts, worries, questions, and the burning desire to realize herself. She will courageously refuse to bind anxiety by knowing too soon, refuse for the sake of her art and for the sake of truth and beauty to reduce her encounter with the landscape to a matter of familiar technique and experience, beneath any surface calm, an internal war. All that not-knowing, all those doubts, all the sense data flooding her from without and within! This is the chaos of working, the necessary chaos that must not be avoided by too much knowing.”

The tendency for many of us to obtain the answer NOW releases the pressure and masks the appearance of an issue because we have “settled” it. This can be a dangerous illusion, and as a good friend wrote to me recently, in his experience “the deepest of questions are often mean and ornery; yet, in the longer run, are spiritually so inviting, potentially golden and ultimately fulfilling….hasty answers prematurely cut off great and noble questions before they naturally come to bloom. A true answer is only identifiable when the question is totally exhausted.”

From Seasons of the Soul print edition 1996