I want answers but am I asking the right questions?

(The following article is not universally applicable. It has been written basis general observations, for anyone who may be able to relate with it at some level.)

Life is questions galore and while we have answers for a few questions, some remain unanswered, yet there are others which generate more questions. These questions vary in accordance with our age and stages of life.

There was a time in history when individuals depended on the wisdom of elders to get answers to some of the life’s big questions. This gave way to gaining answers from scriptures and books and now we have evolved to a stage when the internet is expected to answer all the questions.

There is a fixed broad pattern to these questions and quite simplistically, there are fixed answers to them.

At a young age and / or at a stage when an individual wants to start over the questions generally fall in the following pattern:

What do I want to do?

Most often when any person seeks answers to questions about what they want to do with their lives they are told to ask themselves questions like the following:

Ø Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

Ø What matters to you the most?

Ø What are you most passionate about?

Ø What motivates you?

Ø What gets you out of bed in the morning?

If you are lucky you will find your answer. Let us assume your answer is that you are most passionate about playing guitar and this is what gets you charged and makes you get out of the bed every single day. You want to be a musician.

Once you have figured the above there is a next set of questions waiting for you to get answers to, which are as follows:

Ways to get there?

Ø Who else has been there before you, how did they get there?

Ø Are there any books/ podcasts/you tube videos on this which you may be use for guidance?

After perusing various methods to becoming a musician one reaches a stage where courses have been undergone and degrees are all in place and your performance at the world stage has begun. Where does one go from here? A little more reading and some more motivation is required at this time. Hence, we need to answer the following questions:

How do I get further from here?

Your reading broadens and you start answering the questions which are causing a lack of motivation. You would perhaps lead to the following (some of them or all of them):

Ø Practice the 10,000 hours rule. (Malcom Gladwell)

Ø Persevere and have grit (Angela Duckworth)

Ø Keep your focus

Ø Make incantations, send vibes to the universe of how you would want your life to be. (Rhonda Byrne)

Ø Do not have a plan B.

For some outliers this is the stage of life when everything starts falling in place and they are on their way up. For the others the evolutionary stages of life bring in additional questions of survival which require answers too. These could be akin to the following:

More questions which require answers?

Ø Is passion enough?

Ø What about other passions?

Ø How does one fulfil demands of family life?

Ø How are expectations of parents and partners to be met?

This is the stage where the path becomes fork shaped. We start weighing our options and also think of some plan Bs. Sometimes to choose plan B becomes imperative to resolve the questions of survival. This journey towards plan B leads to its own set of questions which could be as follows:

Survival vs passion

Ø Is this your destiny?

Ø Did you not want your passion bad enough?

Ø What about my incantations?

Ø What is the meaning of happiness?

Ø Who are the Outliers who have achieved this feat and how did they do it? Why am I not like them?

Ø Is there only one way to reach there?

This is the stage when we actually start asking the right questions and realise that there are uneven factors in the lives of individuals who have set out to achieve the same goals and what distinguishes one from the other is not asked or answered in simple one line questions like the above. Variables make all the difference. Life is a complex gamut and there will never be perfect answers which will suit everyone as there are never fixed paths. A deeper understanding of life makes us realise that there will never be a fixed age and there will never be a fixed time frame for anyone to get where they would like to be. There are hardly any constants even for the outliers. In a different time frame, at a different age we may think of our passions differently. Sometimes the destination and the journey both change as we start peeling ourselves with age and time. An important lesson we all learn is that outliers are the exception and not the rule and to brow beat ourselves in comparison to them is not fair. An exploration into these deeper questions also leads us to realise that there are multiple answers as there are multiple methods and ways to arrive at the same point and humans must try to be malleable and ductile as shifting gears gives us hope and faith. There would still be a possibility that we do not end up where we would have liked and we never reach the tipping point despite our best efforts. For me, the answer lies in the following quote by Steve Jobs:

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

I draw my inspiration and strength from this and I hope everyone who is in a similar situation gets their strength from something like this too, since we must keep moving…….

Shweta Kapoor