Living questions

Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?

“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?

Maybe it’s true you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. And despite what Thomas Edison thought, you can’t be interested in everything either. So what should you focus on?

Developer Allen Pike says you should have a research question. Ok, great, but what should it be?

But such questions, interesting as they are, come from outside. They’re ready-made, not bespoke. Your answers to such questions may be useful but since they are not your own questions, many of the answers may not be all that important to you.

“We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” –- Elaine Bellezza, on Hildegard of Bingen

So which are your questions? Which are the questions you seek to live, the questions that have the power to shape your life? Which are the questions that only you can ask, that your unique life might be the answer to?

It may feel hard to address these questions head on, because we may feel the lack of answers most keenly. Perhaps an appropriate question is: what are the questions you most need answers to? What questions do you avoid even articulating, for lack of an answer?

It may feel too heavy to consider the questions that really matter. But you already know what interests you, at least to an extent. Living questions may spring from your areas of interest. What activities and ideas and values most engage you?

Articulating your own living questions may be a way to ‘find the others’ — other people, that is, who are intrigued by or puzzle over the same questions as you. Asking your questions out loud, in public or semi-public, may be a means to find your people. Conversely, the inability to articulate your own questions amounts to a kind of isolation.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” — C.G. Jung

For questions to live, they need to be articulated, therefore you need to write them down.

Uncertainty and diffidence are on your side, because like many living things, questions grow gradually from seed to maturity. The tiny germ of an idea written down is worth far more than a complete thought that remains locked in your head. The former can grow and flourish, while the latter is root bound and in danger of withering before anyone can admire it.

The American physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that writing and thinking are not separate. In his experience, writing is thinking.

Similarly, German sociologist Niklas Luhmann claimed you cannot think without writing - at least not systematically.

“Behind the Zettelkasten technique stands the experience: You can’t think without writing - at least not in a sophisticated way, selective access to memory in demanding contexts. This also means: without marking differences, one cannot think.” — ZK II: Zettel 9/8g - Niklas Luhmann-Archiv.

Living questions amount to a personal research programme, an agenda for thought and action.

“Richard Feynman¹ was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”― Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts.

Living questions can arise organically - there is no need to force them. Living questions are not what you think you should focus on, but what you actually do focus on. They are the questions and themes you find yourself returning to.

Living questions can arise organically from a process of writing notes without hierarchy. The Zettelkasten approach to notetaking can aid this organic discovery of key questions. A Zettelkasten helps you write ‘from the bottom up’ instead of ‘from the top down’. Without any predetermined categories you take short notes and link them. At first everything seems random and scattered, but over time themes emerge by themselves, and because the notes are linked you can identify clusters of interest. This way, from fragments you can build a greater whole.

Of his own Zettelkasten, Luhmann said:

“Much peters out, many notes one will never ever see again. On the other hand there are preferred centres, where lumps grow and areas with which one works more often than others. There are large projected idea-complexes that were never executed and there are asides that keep enriching and inflating themselves; that, while located at subordinate text passages, more and more tend to dominate the system.” — Johannes Schmidt: The Zettelkasten as the second brain of Niklas Luhmann. YouTube Lecture (28:36) | Translation Transcript

He also said: “The order adapts to the development of the thinking.”

Although I’ve assumed that living questions need to be articulated in words, the starting point might be non-verbal. It might instead be visual. For example, instead of writing down your questions and desires, you could instead map your desire lines. Visakan Veerasamy says “The paths you take when you’re following your desires will reveal things to you”. And the historian Franco Moretti writes:

“A good map is worth a thousand words, cartographers say, and they are right: because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubts, ideas. It poses new questions, and forces you to look for new answers.” — Atlas of the European Novel (Source).

Living questions are not set in stone. The mathematician Richard Hamming recommended changing research areas every seven years so as to avoid becoming stuck in a self-created rut.

In fact it may make sense to think of your wider life — not just your research — in chunks of roughly seven years.

Think Of Your Life In Chunks | Dr. Ian O’Byrne.

It has often been said that while we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in one year, we underestimate what’s possible in ten.

Our path through a period of seven years to a decade may take one of several shapes. There isn’t just a single possible path.

The educationalist Bryan Mathers thinks about ‘pathways’ through learning processes. He uses the metaphors of stepping stones, collections and constellations.

• Stepping stones are sequential and prescriptive.
• A collection is prescriptive but non-linear.
• A constellation is non-linear and descriptive.

These are different but equally valid ways of making a meaningful path through a series of locations or mileposts.

Image Credit: Pathways by Visual Thinkery is licensed under CC-BY-ND.

Some examples of living questions mapped

Questions — Emmanuel Quartey

Each of Emmanuel’s questions has its own web page (Title, Question I return to, I’m curious about, I want to, Establishing quotation, Overview, Stories, Request to send leads and resources). I really like this little framework.

Interests — Ayelet Fishbach

Psychologist Ayelet Fishbach lists her research interests in six areas: Self-control, intrinsic motivation, social connection, feedback, patience, healthy lifestyle.

Her overall approach is introduced with a quote from a profile article: “What unites Fishbach’s research is a kind of hopefulness. Her work shows how we can live up to our highest aspirations.”

Each area is described in a sentence or two and then a statement starting with “My research explores…” followed by three featured articles.

Tom Critchlow’s map of inquiry

A clickable map of four overlapping subject areas, linking to web pages for each of 18 projects. Anyway, it used to be clickable, which was cool.

Patrick Collison’s Questions

The co-founder of Stripe lists 23 interesting questions, similar to lists by bloggers Alexey Guzey and Gwern.

Summary

All this talk about ’living the questions’ can be simplified and summarised. It really adds up to what another poet, Mary Oliver called ‘Instructions for living a life’:

“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Well, I’ve been accumulating notes on ‘living questions’ for quite a while now, and I realised it was about time to pull them together and indeed to tell about it. I hope you find at least some of this useful. And if you have your own set of living questions you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about it.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

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