Popping the Question(s)

A plug for carefully curating questions, 'cause curiosity begets creation.

Oh boy, friends. Boy-o, boy-o, boy. I’m afraid I’ve got dates and questions and many, MANY little bits and bobs filtering through the old mind mesh today. Let me just grab onto one and dive right in. Today would have been my parents’ 71st wedding anniversary. Seventy-one years! That’s a long time for anything, but a really long time for a marriage. I woke up marveling about it first thing this morning, which sent me hunting for a photo I have of my mother on my parents’ honeymoon at Niagara Falls. It’s so faded that even the most purposeful squinting fails to unmask the unofficial 8th wonder of the world as anything more than a bit of ghostly gossamer.

My mother, demonstrating purposeful squinting, with her back to the phantom falls.

I first laid eyes on this photo in 2021, just after both my parents died. What most struck me about it was the way in which my mother’s head and hips were subtly tilted one way and her shoulders and feet the other. Like the curves of a question mark. So struck was I by this that it inspired this little poem:

She stands at the edge

of a road, at the edge

of a life

into which she will cascade

white, just like

the falls behind her.

Yesterday she took a vow

and now

she poses, in full surrender.

A breeze plays at her hem,

a smile plays at her lips,

belying what must surely have felt

tentative and tender.

Head juts right, so do hips.

Shoulders and feet lean left.

She is

a question

mark.

Question mark, in wedding white.

I know, friends. This is all just so much conjecture. I wasn’t there, and I don’t know what my mother was thinking or feeling. I can’t possibly know for certain whether she was full of regrets, celebration, some of both, or neither.

This is what I do know, though: I know that she and my dad hadn’t known each other all that long before he popped THE question, and she said YES. Because both of them, at the ripe old age of 24, were already pushing the envelope on prime marriageable age back then (yes, really) and eager to get a move on things. I also know that the menu of options for charting your future course as a working-class, female-identified human in 1954 rust belt America was rather…mmm…limited.

There’s also what I know from having spent a half a century of watching my mother twist in the mutable winds of what others wanted and needed her to be. I consistently observed that her life of devotional service seemed to leave her full in some ways but empty in many others. And that she was perpetually plagued by migraines and insomnia. And, ultimately, I observed her off-gassing the poison of long-held resentment when Alzheimer’s cracked the lock on the safe where she kept it all hidden.

What was it the Buddha said? Oh, yes. Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Lastly, there’s what I know from having served as her apprentice. I, too, got married just a hare over age 24 to someone I didn’t really know. I, too, lived in reaction to what others needed and wanted me to be. I, too, found constant traveling companions in chronic headaches and insomnia. But I only did this for a decade, whereas my mother did it for over six.

So taking all I *do know* and applying a little deductive reasoning, I pieced together something like a theory as I reflected once more on the photo of my mother standing at the side of that road, the spray of the falls misting the threshold of her new life:

There must have been quite a quantity of questions she’d not yet asked herself (and perhaps never did). And if you never ask, you never get answers.

Mind you, I don’t fault my mother for any of this. And I also honor her experience of marriage to my father and all that it manifested. It would have been nearly impossible, given the cultural context of her circumstances, to have had the resources and support to focus on herself. Yet still, she managed to lead a life of meaning and purpose. It just may have been meaning and purpose that didn’t align very well with her most essential self.

In some fundamental way, every life is arguably a question mark, even with all the evolution (and in some cases, devolution) that’s happened in the past 70+ years. We simply can’t know who we are until we get a lay of the land and locate ourselves in it.

And what was it that Michelangelo said? Oh, yes. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

So how do we do that, exactly? Well, friends. I think there are different paths to get to the same destination. Some take longer than others, and some certainly leave us more bedraggled and demoralized than others. As Jean de la Fontaine famously said, “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” I sure did.

Generally speaking though, I think that if we want to take the more direct and pleasant route to unveiling our inner masterpiece (and I do believe we all have one of those), being curious about who we are helps us get clear on who we are. And that, in turn, helps us know where to head and what to do with ourselves. For instance, we might ask ourselves:

• What makes me come alive? Conversely, what makes me feel dead inside?

• What sort of values did I inherit from family? Do those values resonate for me, or do they feel like a legacy burden that’s breaking my back and spirit?

• Do my current life circumstances (relationships, how I spend time, maybe even what I wear or how I look) align with what feels right and true and valuable for me? Or do I feel like I’m living an obligatory life to meet someone else’s specifications?

Keep asking. The real you is in there, somewhere.

These questions are not exhaustive, nor are they a one-and-done endeavor, friends. The cosmic curriculum has us humans in a state of perpetual evolution, which means we’re constantly changing in ways large and small. Even so, I believe that when we’re consciously and compassionately curious about ourselves, we make choices that support our most aligned life. We also travel more lightly, because we cast off the unexamined flotsam and jetsam of previous generations and carry only what’s truly ours.

This is not to negate nor malign the mores of family or cultural lineage, by the way. Indeed, some — or all — the values we were raised with may feel authentically aligned. But even if that’s the case, it’s still worth investigating so that we’re sure. Because posing such questions of ourselves can save us from discovering, decades in, that we’ve been squeezing ourselves into an ill-fitting life.

We’re in a very ill-fitting collective moment right now, friends. There’s so much being foisted on us from the fascist f*ckery machine that *isn’t* within our control. But curating our own values and living in alignment with them is always ours for the choosing. And when we make that self-supporting choice, life becomes a lot more like the loose-fitting garment we long for.

“You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.” [Quote by D.H. Lawrence; Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash]

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