Walk With Me (#50): An Invitation
An advice column for folks who don’t like to be told what to do
Dear Asha,
Questions are all well and good, but I’m kind of in the market for answers. Have you got any of those?
QK
Dear QK,
Short answer, sorry to say: No.
Longer answer: Oh, honey. I get it. This whole not knowing what will happen, what is coming, or what all the consequences will be is just more than my soul can take some days. It is exhausting. I would just like someone to tell me what to do.
The great irony is that when someone does try to tell me what to do I get really hostile because it’s not that I actually want someone else to know what to do. It’s that I want to know what to do — somehow, miraculously. I want to skip to the end of the story.
I am not a fan of moral relativism. I do think there are some basic ideas about right and wrong that allow humans, in all their complexity and imperfection, to live in community together. Leading with violence to get what you want? Bad. Sharing? Good. Despite the fact that those sorts of basic ideas are the stuff of preschool social instruction, it is remarkable how many people reach adulthood without integrating those lessons into their daily lives.
I don’t suspect those are the sorts of answers you’re looking for, however. You’re looking, as we all so often are, for definitive answers to complicated questions about life direction, the nature of existence, what the hell it all means. I’m sorry to say, my love, it’s not just that I don’t have those answers; it’s that no one does.
We’re all just stumbling around in the dark together most of the time, bumping into each other and, hopefully, not doing too much damage to ourselves and others. Sometimes the dark is a little less deep and we can see enough to make deliberate choices that incorporate context and a sense of direction. Most of the time we’re just groping around, vainly trying to find a light switch before we run into something.
The people, in my experience, who are really dangerous are those folks who are righteously convinced they know the answers. They patently refuse to acknowledge the not-knowing we’re all swimming in, and their flailing is not unlike a blindfolded kid at a piñata party with a very big stick. Some candy might come out of it, but it’s more likely someone’s just going to get hurt.
When I was a kid learning how to be in the woods I learned that the best thing to do when you’re lost is just to stay put. Stop wandering and flailing. Get still. Listen and have faith. I realize that is not the answer you’re likely looking for, but if you want answers to find you it’s the best idea I’ve got to help that happen.
If the receptiveness inherent in that method feels too passive for comfort, I would refer you to the words of Rainier Maria Rilke in his Letters To A Young Poet. He writes:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Living into your questions is an active invitation for all you are meant to experience and know to find you in the darkness. Even as you are moving through your day there can always be a part of you that is deeply listening — open, vulnerable, and receptive — for a leading, a hint, an intuition about what the next right thing is. You can get a long, long way just focusing on one step at a time.
Be present for your life right now, just as it is. I know it’s painfully hard, but try to quiet the panic and worry about not knowing the answers. Focus on the questions. Launch them out into the ether again and again, patiently, faithfully, and trust that the answers will find you. They will be unexpected and strange and require you to transform, expand, and ask new questions.
That’s it. That’s my answer. It’s the only answer that’s ever truly found me.
Thank you for walking this journey with me. Love to you and yours.
XO, Asha
Friends, there are only two more weeks to find this column weekly here on Medium. If you have a question, don’t delay. Email me at ashasanaker@gmail.com with the heading “Walk With Me”.
After that, all of my writing will be published first via my Substack newsletter, “Let Your Life Speak”. If you want personal essays, resources, and ideas on how to navigate your questions with compassion and integrity, I hope you’ll join me there.