After the Question Mark: Finding Meaning in Not Knowing
“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended—knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.” This quote from Ann Patchett’s “The Dutch House” made me pause and hold my breath. She put into words the experience known for so many and so human, and yet one that we resist and fear.
The Suspension Between What Was and What’s Next
Being suspended between the certainty of the past - even if that certainty was only an illusion - and the uncertainty of the future, urges us toward answers. We so madly want to know them right away. And this urge, instead of helping us land in the future, pushes us to our past.
Many come to therapy or coaching, or other forms of personal development, searching for answers and facing internal conflicts that feel unbearable. But what often becomes clear - alongside personal growth - is that there are questions which cannot be answered, or at least, not immediately.
A Story of Choosing the Question Over the Answer
Quite recently, I had a conversation with a dear friend who has realised her age, health, and energy demand from her transitioning to a calmer and more balanced way of living. A free, adventurous and nomadic soul, she recognised a need to settle down. She has been offered attractive options - should I live in the south of France? Or join a community in England? Should I stay in Ibiza? It would seem easy to decide, as all the options seem attractive and special, and yet, she did not do that, instead, she connected with the sadness about some part of her life ending, and the vastness of the question where to live - a question that - in order to be answered - reveals deeper questions. Who am I at this point in my life? How do I want to live? Who do I want to relate to and in what way? What makes my life meaningful?
My friend did something that not many of us have the courage to do: she allowed herself to stay with the question and allow it to open something for her. She leaped and stayed present with being suspended without knowing. It would be easy to rush to find a rationalisation of a “new dream” or fall back to what she already knows (and is “supposed to know” at her age), but instead she chose to be present with such uneasy questions. Seeing her courage made me reflect on how rarely we allow ourselves to do that - for ourselves or others.
Why We Struggle to Sit With Not Knowing
Sometimes we are so focused on getting what we want that we forget what questions propelled our journey in the first place. That conversation - full of big questions - and witnessing my friend’s vulnerability inspired me to reflect on the value of not chasing answers.
The energy behind wanting to know is often tight and racing, we want to know and we want to know it now, there is a flavour of rejecting ourselves without the completion of having the answer. I think this urgency is why we often feel stuck. We grasp the first plausible idea suggested by our anxious mind, and we don’t give the question space to fully bloom as we cannot hold ourselves in the tension of uncertainty and not knowing.
The Culture of Answers and Immediate Relief
We behave as we deserve the answer and we have to know right away, and our culture feeds that sense of hastiness and immediacy. We turn to friends, Google and now even AI, hoping for instant relief.
But the risk is that if we rush to the answer, we might lose our humanness, uniqueness and depth somewhere on the way.
Our culture also doesn’t support the slowness and vulnerability of not knowing. We praise the ones who claim to have ‘found the answer’, ‘discovered the secret’ - who seem confident and possess an aura of insight.
What If the Question Itself Is the Gift?
When I encourage you to pause before answering, I’m not talking about the everyday questions and decisions. I am talking about the burning, uncomfortable, deep and sometimes painful questions of:
Who am I?
What am I here for?
How to love and be loved?
How to live my life?
Why do I feel this way?
How do I make my life meaningful?
Not knowing answers to these questions can make us miserable and we turn outwards looking for recipes, ways and solutions we can absorb as ours. We listen to our parents and friends or - on the contrary - we oppose everything that we think “we should”. We turn to esoteric systems, oracles, astrology, self-help gurus and people of “success”. These systems and sources are valuable and there is nothing wrong with including them in our life - as long as they are not misused as substitutes for inner listening.
If we look for answers, this means we are alive. And if we stay curious and give space for our own insight, and if we value listening to ourselves as much as to the external “authorities”, we might arrive at an answer. And if not that, we might deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world, ground firmly in our reality and allow creativity to surface.
Live the Questions Now
My friend is turning 73 in a few months. Her courage to admit to herself that she doesn’t know all the answers and allows herself to be present without pressuring for an answer truly moved me. And perhaps the best advice for those suspended, in-between moments comes from my friend’s favourite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Allowing ourselves not to fill up the space after the question mark invites discomfort of uncertainty and the possibility of creating an answer of our own, an answer with no guarantee or confirmation, but one that springs from trust, authenticity and the vulnerability of showing up without a safety net.
What question in your life might be asking you to wait, rather than answer?