Questions vs answers
Feb 11, 2020
We are trained all through school to focus on answers. To think answers are more important than questions. We treat answers with a lot of respect and overlook the questions.
But questions hold power. The ability to ask the right questions increases your power even before you get the answers. To get to the answers, it is fundamental to first ask the questions. That means being open to not knowing. Hold the space empty for a while; let the answer come from there. If the space is already taken, you cannot get an answer.
You may want to change your job but are not sure where to go next and can’t deal with uncertainty. So you decide to make a lateral move to a competitor. You have already filled the space where an answer could be formed. A different answer. If the place is filled, a new answer cannot appear. And you may lose the opportunity to find a better work environment.
Just practise asking the question and then pausing. Let the answers come to you. From the inside: from your body, your mind, your head or your guts. From the outside: from people who talk to you, ads you see on TV, a song that plays on the radio. Leave space for the answers to come to you. Be an observer, slow down so that you can get the message when it comes. Because it always does.
The flipside of listening to signs is that sometimes we fabricate them in our own mind. In a desperate need to be told what to do next, we think we see coincidences and signs where there are none and we force decisions because of these imagined signs.
Signs are easy to fabricate. A fortune teller tells us we will fall in love with a man whose name starts with A. We meet a man called Andrew and we think it’s him. Not necessarily. We love spaghetti Bolognese, we go on a date with a girl who loves spaghetti Bolognese as well and we think “That’s it! It’s a sign that we are meant to be together.” Not necessarily. You go to work in the morning and find your inbox jammed with emails about a certain business opportunity. Incidentally, you also read about the same opportunity in the newspaper when you had your morning coffee. It does not necessarily mean it’s the right business opportunity for you. When the universe talks to us, it does not shout. It usually whispers. The messages have a sense of timelessness and easiness about them. For some reason they catch your attention and stir a feeling inside you, most of the time a feeling which initially has no name. It simply touches you.
Over time, if you ignore what you are being told, the messages tend to get louder and louder, but this happens because we don’t want to see them or accept their meaning. For instance, exhaustion and sickness are forms of repeatedly ignored messages.
Signs we look for are usually not real signs; they are the territory of fabricated imagination. On the other hand, signs that come to us unexpectedly and which touch us even before we understand what they are about are probably real. For instance, let’s say you are trying to decide whether to go to the seaside or to the mountains for your holidays. You have been thinking about this for a few days and still have no answer. You need to make a decision today. Just as you enter the coffee shop to buy your morning double skinny cappuccino, you hear a song that immediately brings tears to your eyes. You are not sure why but you notice this. Then you remember it’s a song you often heard as a child at your grandparents’ place. Those were happy times for you. And your grandparents lived by the sea. There’s an answer to your question. You did not look for this sign, you did not plan to hear the song, and moreover, you were touched by the song even before you realised why or the connection to your question. This is very likely a true sign.
Similarly, if you ask a question and get an answer in your mind in the form of a picture, and you try to change that picture – say it’s a green meadow, you try to make it blue in your mind and you can actually do it – it is usually the product of your imagination. However, if you see a green meadow in your mind and no matter how much you try to change it, it keeps on reverting back to a green meadow, it’s likely a true sign, a true answer to your question.
Be aware of when you are chasing signs and stop doing this. The signs you find when chasing will be meaningless. Let yourself be surprised by those which come to you unexpectedly, welcome them and add them to your inner wisdom.
They will guide you to your truth.
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