Questions Without Answers

I often, and have since I can remember, question what life is all about. Why am I here? Where is here? Who are you? Why everything? What are thoughts? Where do they live? Why doesn’t my mind get old like my body gets old? Or does it?

What is natural and what is fake? If everything on earth was created from something on earth then why isn’t everything natural? Everything that is made can be made. Everything that is learned can be learned. Human beings have not yet created something from nothing. Everything, including plastics, chemicals, splitting atoms, gene splicing, was here all along. It’s just a question of putting the right elements together, elements that already exist. No one has created a damn thing.

I didn’t invent metaphysical thinking and I started thinking these thoughts long before I had ever heard the words philosophy or metaphysics or heard anyone else verbalize these questions. So where does it come from?

I remember when I was about five years old I was playing alone on a tire swing. Just swinging softly back and forth lost in my own thoughts. I started to sing a song to God. It started out as a little song but I kept thinking of things I wanted to add to the song, so with each thought I had to start the song over to include my new concern. The song went on forever as every question and thought I had was added to this litany to God. Finally, my mother saved me from my first recollected existential dilemma and called me in for dinner. My litany hasn’t gotten any shorter and I fear it hasn’t gotten anymore sophisticated than it was forty-nine years ago.

Through the years, I’ve sought answers to my questions in philosophy and religion. No group has any answers. Each time I explored a new path I found the same questions answered with that leap-of-faith response, "it’s a mystery!" It’s either God’s mystery, or Jesus’ mystery, or the mysterious ways of the creator, or Krsna knows and if we achieve Krsna Consciousness the blinders on our eyes will be lifted and we, too, will know. If, when, then. No one knows the answer no matter how hard they try to believe they do. Jane Wagner said it best when she said that "reality is a collective hunch." That I can agree with.

Why is any of this relevant? I mean, what’s wrong with just not knowing? Nothing is wrong with not knowing. But how do you measure the success or failure of your life if you have no vision of what the purpose of it is? Is getting up every day and going to work of any consequence to anyone but my own comfort? Does it need to be?

Questions, questions, questions without answers, and yet, everyday I get up and go to work. Everyday I do what I believe is right regardless of the scores of thoughts to do the contrary pass through my mind. Everyday I do what I know how to do and try to be satisfied with it. Everyday I wake up not knowing why I’m doing it but do it anyway. Everyday I ask the same questions and know I don’t have the answers and never will. But I'll get up again tomorrow and ask them again anyway.