CHAPTER 1
LIVING THE QUESTIONS: WHY CHANGE THE NARRATIVE NOW?
[…] have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and do 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 be able to live them. The point is to live everything.Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1903)
Our culture is obsessed with quick-fix solutions and immediate answers. Time is at a premium and we don’t want to waste it dwelling on questions. The credo is: let’s get practical and not waste time with theory or philosophy! But how can you waste time with the ‘love of wisdom’? Is it not wisdom that will help us chart our path into an uncertain and unpredictable future? Do we not desperately need wisdom to respond wisely to the multiple converging crises around us? With wisdom we can see these healing crises as the drivers of a deeper cultural transformation that is already occurring in many places around the world and spreading rapidly, challenging us to let go of outdated mental models and a narrative about who we are that no longer serves us.
Questions, more than answers, are the pathway to collective wisdom
By living and loving the questions more deeply we can rediscover the beauty and abundance around us, find deep meaning in belonging to the universe, deep joy in nurturing relationships with all of life, and deep satisfaction in co-creating a thriving and healthier life for all. Questions, more than answers, are the pathway to collective wisdom. Questions can spark culturally creative conversations that transform how we see ourselves and our relationship to the world. With this in mind, everything changes instantly.
In a culture that demands definitive answers, questions seem to have only a transient significance; their purpose is to lead us to answers. But in the face of constant and rapid change and uncertainty, might not questions rather than answers offer a more appropriate compass? History offers many examples of yesterday’s solutions becoming today’s problems, so perhaps answers are the transient means to help us ask better questions. Should we not pay more attention to asking the right questions, rather than become obsessed with quick solutions? Equally, in favouring practice over theory, are we not demonstrating how we have become blind to the fact that any practical action is based on our ideas and beliefs about the world whether we are conscious of them or not? The separation of theory and practice is false; they are not opposites but two sides of the same coin. We cannot act wisely
