THE QUESTION

There could be a time when you are asked the question, by yourself or maybe another. This will be no ordinary question, nor will it be one for which you have a readily available answer. It is an unsettling moment that your consciousness may first try to pass off as nothing more than the fanciful whimsy of a bored mind. You vainly attempt to carry on as if the world had not just been set ablaze, trying in futility to focus on the common and mundane pieces that make up the fabric of your day to day life but the flames will not subside. Instead they grow from a small spark in your subconscious, quickly jumping breaks and spreading till they propagate into the wild blaze that consumes all your thoughts. Quickly it burns through mind and soul until nothing is left except the smoldering ashes of what your world used to be. Only then, as you sift through ashes, can you see the question for what it is. It is the universe challenging you to truly understand it better.

To know something in its essence, to know what drives it, what inspires it, is to obtain true understanding. This is the loftiest of goals and one our society constantly fails, not to achieve, but pursue. We live in a society of instant information where so many of us confuse knowledge with wisdom. We know so much but understand so little. From the time we are young we are indoctrinated with too many facts and not enough ideas. It is the tragedy of our generation that has built a wall around our minds. Great leaps of innovation and shifts in philosophy have never been achieved by wrapping one’s self in the established and comfortable. They are driven by the new and the vexing. There are many people who fear the flames as well as the challenges it brings. They beat back at the fire because it threatens the foundation they have built their view of the world on. A view that they have wrapped themselves in like a childhood blanket. As when we were children, we are unwilling to let it go of it all the while failing to realize that to have a better house one must first build a stronger foundation.

I implore you not to make this mistake because it is a signature moment in your life with origins that reach back to the inception of the soul itself. It may have first been contemplated around a prehistoric fire as some distant ancestor searched the vastness of the nighttime sky asking, “Who am I?” Perhaps it was pondered by Adam and Eve outside the gates of Eden. Maybe the beginning matters and maybe it does not. For all I know that is the question for you. What truly matters is the way the fire changes you. The way it consumes the comfortably assumed and returns the fire hardened because I can promise you one thing. In today’s world unchallenged preconceived notions are truly root of all evil.