What If

loving the questions themselves

I watch my mind ricochet these days from the conviction that catastrophe is imminent (or is already here) to knowing from a knowing I can’t name that this mash-up of what we call the world—the wars, the kidnappings, the climate, the heartbreak, the ever-increasing ocean of plastic—is a snapshot of a bigger picture we cannot see. And so, when I catch myself wandering into thinking I know what’s supposed to be happening and this is definitely not it, I remind myself what Rilke said about “loving the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

On some days, just one of these questions is enough to bring me back to calm. On other days, I need five or six of them because asking them, one after the other, is enough to remind me that I am seeing things through a narrow, constricted lens—and there is another way.

What if what is happening now in the apparent out there is exactly what needs to happen for the next opening to occur?

What if we don’t know what’s supposed to happen and we are only seeing a snapshot of the present and drawing conclusions from that?

What if I stopped arguing with the way things are?

What if I didn’t keep comparing this body now to the body I used to have?

What if I didn’t wake up with the idea that something is wrong and someone is to blame?

What if every time I felt fear, I stopped, and realized that I was believing something that wasn’t true?

What if I stopped believing my thoughts? Just stopped? And kept my commitment to look between them?

What if when I started galloping into the future (and felt the anxiety that comes along with it) or started bringing up the past (and dove into guilt and shame), I kept a holy vigilance and refused to stay on those tracks?

What if we are caterpillars in the gooey dark ooze stage of a cocoon and are making the mistake of assuming there won’t be flying upon emergence?

What if what Nisargadatta says—that what we see in the world is a projection of our minds and that if we want a different world, we first need to have order in ourselves—and only then, can we walk ourselves back to clarity?

What if the chaos we are experiencing now is akin to the theory of dissipated structures where under specific conditions, disorganization can lead to spontaneous order?

What if I only wanted what Galway Kinnell wanted in his poem, Prayer: “Whatever happens. Whatever what is is what I want. Only that. But that.”

What if the freedom that many wisdom teachers say is here, now, is our very nature and really is here now?