Questions & Answers

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. 

~Zora Neale Hurston

I wonder if 2013 will ask...or answer. As a year, 2012 answered a lot of questions. A lot. It also asked its fair share. It was a full year.When I think back over everything that happened during the previous 12 months, my head spins a little. Job hunt, house buying and selling, packing, relocation, learning a new place, new pets, losing pets, kindergarten, preschool, new sports, losing family, gaining family.

Before putting away our 2012 calender yesterday, I looked back over the first several months of the year...every square was packed. The middle part of the year? Fallow, a resting and adjusting time. Some fear. Learning how to be together in a new place, without the joyful distraction of friends and neighbors and appointments. Settling in. The ending of the year? Almost every square was packed again. New friends, new appointments.

And so, how will 2013 be? I guess however it is doesn't really matter. It's what you do with what is. And so, what are you going to do with it? Live it? Live the questions? Or simply survive it, searching for answers outside ourselves as we crash through life? Hmmm. Of course, the answer we all yearn for is the former...to live it. But what does that mean and can you really pull it off in this day and age when information, technology, time restraints and wanting to do it all can create a whirl of insanity and exhaustion inside you? This is one of the reasons we both refuse to get a smart phone.

A couple years ago, Sascha and I were talking...or playing a game...or reading something...I can't remember...but the question of How do you define success? arose. Some of the answers presented didn't click for either of us and so I asked Sascha, "Well, how do you define success?" expecting something analytical and left-brained...

He replied, "When everyone in our family is thriving."

Well, then.

I don't think there is a better way to answer that question. He surprises me, that one.

And so...Resolutions be damned. Intentions be damned. Aspirations be damned. However you phrase your "new year new life" commitments, none of that works for me. It never has, though I've tried. Instead, we're going to go with thriving. It's not a goal, it's not an end result. It's a process, a way of being...at least in my mind. It's living your questions, finding the ones that truly need asking and are worth answering. As Rilke wrote, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. 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..."

So, thriving. Not "happiness". Not accomplishment. Not end results. Simply finding that path through yourself to the knowledge of the things that delight you, the darkness that frightens you, the places that sustain you...and how to live that. How to maintain your balance of delight and fear, rest and growth. Knowing that without the one, there cannot be the other. And knowing that you already hold within you all you need to thrive.