"A question holds all the potential of the living universe within it. Questions are far more valuable than answers ... if you continue to seek questions you cannot stray far off the proper road."
Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit
I came across this quote last week while listening to Savit's book on audible during an early morning hike along the canal. The words stopped me in my tracks. I pondered the word question, a word with quest as its root. There is power in the asking, for a question propels and spurs and nudges and shoves you on a journey.
And there are many journeys within a quest.
Then I thought of question as a punctuation mark, and how it curves out, up, and around before leading straight to the period which isn't connected, but still part of the whole.
I've asked many questions throughout my life, and standing there on the canal I realized how often the act of seeking an answer became the answer itself; that is, the destination became absorbed into the quest. During those times the search for one, definitive answer allowed me to gather many answers along the way.
Sometimes, the answer may not have been what I was looking for, and sometimes an answer is for a question not yet asked.
Of course, sometimes the answer to a question is there is no answer.
But an unanswered question is, strangely enough, still an answer.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
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