Every morning, every day starts with a simple question. Every day IS a question, and it is answered by nightfall. That question of course is different each day. That question is sometimes explicit, and it is sometimes unknown, foggy, and just hanging around.
Every day’s question is something unique, and something worth exploring. Each question is an exploration, an attempt at something new, a new lesson, a new experience, a new dollar, a new game, a new friend, a new pet, a new taste, a new waste.
So yes, some days that question is clear and undeniable. It is the reason for skipping a meal, for moving fast, for impatience. Other days the question is submerged beneath the surface of available options.
An interesting consequence of having a clear question is that the answer is clear as well. The question exists, but the answer is dangled right there, hanging at the end of the day, waiting to be proven correct. It’s just a hypothesis until completed; then it’s the answer.
What is today’s question for you? Is it just another day of hoping to chase a ball around the park for an hour? Is it noticing a smell of something new and trailing that scent all day long? Or maybe the smell is coming from outside the window and all you can do is sit attentively in front of that window and hope that maybe, just maybe, the source of that smell will pass by, making itself known to you finally, easing all your questions and wonders about what could possibly be making that smell outside your window.
But more often than not, that smell continues on enshrouded in mystery, veiled and unrevealed. Your mind wanders around through catalogues of past odors experienced, compares it to that one spot in Maine, or that beautiful day on the beach, or the pizza delivery man’s shoes. You wade through piles of odor memories, the many garbage varieties you’ve spent hours dissecting, and the many more hours you’ve spent just high off the undissectable thick stench of perfectly rotting smells.
It is the ultimate hypocrisy, that although your mission in life is to peel apart various smells, to move from the front of the smell into the parts that make up the whole, it is precisely when you cannot, when you are unable to pull apart those parts, when their natures are so intertwined, when their borders are unrecognizable… it is during these times, it is when encountering these layered smells that you find your most enjoyment.
What is it about the love of an unanswerable question? Why is that so joy producing? Why is the unsolvable puzzle the height of joy for a puzzle addict? Well this question hasn’t been asked as accurately as it could have been. When I say “unsolvable” I of course mean that it remains unsolvable for a period of time long enough that it requires considerable dedication and focus, it does not simply “solve itself” in the same way that, say, the odor of a single cigarette from across the park identifies itself in the moment it reaches your nose.
No, instead the joy is not in the cataloguing of new smells, but in solving the new smells. (The catalogue is simply the result of not being able to forget). So when a new smell presents itself as a challenge, when it does not roll over and ‘play dead’, it reawakens you, it puts you to work, and even if it remains unsolvable for a day, a week, a month, or an hour, even if during that time you run around in circles whimpering, even if you howl at the moon and bark at the mailman, the smell has forced you to be alive, has pulled you into a mission, and in a mission, you can be aimed, you can be focused, you can ask a single question and work to answer it.
There is nothing more enjoyable, more fulfilling than having a question that is worth answering. A hard unworthy question gets passed on by. An easy unworthy question makes you feel cheap. It is the sweet spot of a question worth answering + a question worth working for that gives life – all life – meaning.
So are you aimless? Are you bored? Are you lying on the living room floor in a dust-free environment? Are the windows closed? Have you not experienced a new smell in weeks? If so, the question for you might be: how can I find a new question? What must I do, what must I communicate to my owner, in order to simply have the opportunity to find a new question to answer?
Captain’s Log: June 24, 2010 8:01 am
Year #32, Month #395, Week #1,718, Day #12,015
89th Corridor, West Dog Island
