Don't ask the question if you can't handle the answer.....................

 I run into trouble when I ask myself why I’m doing things.

-Annie Mueller

Checking in with Will.......................

 

Toby.  Approach, Sir Andrew.  Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st.*

Andrew.  Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late,

Toby.  A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can.  To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.  Does not our lives consist of the four elements?

Andrew.  Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.

Toby.  Th' art a scholar!  Let us therefore eat and drink.  Marian I say, a stoup of wine!

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,  Act II, Scene III

*Ed. Note:  Those of Shakespeare's time would have recognized Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est as "it is most beautiful to rise early.

awe and mystery....................

 There are no great answers, you could say, but only great questions made greater when their answerers are nobly defeated by the awe and mystery of the way things are.

-Stephen Jenkinson

thanks Julian

The trouble with really smart people......

 Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”

He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.

-Morgan Housel, from here

A useful channel.....................

 ..................................for questions and answers.

A story of rebellion.................

 Here is how Paul describes himself: “I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I’m mad, or the world is.” He continues: “My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.”

-Bari Weiss, from her intro to this Paul Kingsnorth essay

Because.............................

      We picked up our oyster loaves and once again were out on the pier eating lunch together.  He sat at the very end of the dock on the crapping pier and tossed sticks to the dogs, who gallivanted into the shallow water to retrieve them.  They swam back to the pier, shook the water from their fur, and dropped the sticks at our feet, waiting for the next toss.  After several more throws, they sensed a change in mood and swam off toward the beach, leaving my father and me alone.

     "It's getting worse, Jim," he said flatly.  "It's the scariest thing I have ever been through in my life."  I didn't know what to say.  I was in tears but couldn't speak.  Saying I was sorry just didn't feel like enough.  My dad sensed this immediately and changed the topic.  "You know why I chose to fly instead of go to sea?"

      There it was, the question that had been nagging at me all these years.  Now, on the end of the pier near the end of his lucid days, I was going to get the answer.  "Why?" I asked.

     "Because it was what I wasn't supposed to do.  Looks like you have made a career out of that, doing what you're not supposed to do.  I'm proud of you, boy."

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Question answered....................

 Parents, teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors bombarded me with the same question: "What are you going to do with your life?"  I didn't even want to think about that when I was fourteen.  My teachers called me a daydreamer.  They would write comments on my report card like, "He seems to live in a fantasy world and prefers that to paying serious attention to serious subject matters that will prepare him for life."

     The life they were so hell-bent on preparing me for bored the living shit out of me.  It seemed way too serious.  I saw more meaning in the mysteries of the ocean and the planets than in theology or religion.  I was too busy figuring out ways to skip school, go diving, and get laid.  My heroes were not presidents, they were pirates.  Emerging from adolescence with a healthy "lack of respect for the proper authorities," and a head full of romanticism and hero worship, I was able to come up with an answer.

    Q. What are you going to do with your life?

    A. Live a pretty interesting one.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

     

What.................................?

 Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?  What explains those original causes or initial conditions?  And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

But not all of us........................

. . . we have 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day from now until the end of this decade.

-from this Ben Carlson post, in which he offers answers to six significant questions about the economy

On questions and answers........

 To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

-Christopher Hitchens, from this Vanity Fair essay

No questions, no answers............

      To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning.  Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature never puts the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people.  And where no one asks, no one need answer.

-Carl Gustav Jung, from his essay "The Development of Personality"

Nagging.......................

 What the hell?  Kelly frowned in frustration at the traffic because he didn't know the answer, but then there were a lot of questions to which he hadn't known the answers in the last six months.  He told his mind to be quiet and watched the traffic, even though it kept up its inquiries in a nagging sort of background noise.  One's mind, after all, rarely obeys its own commands.

-Tom Clancy,  Without Remorse

On questions and answers...............

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

If you ask the right person some really good questions............................

 ..............you are likely to get some really good answers.

Smart guy............................

      Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher, made important discoveries in geometry and careful observations of the frequency of natural events.  His prediction of the solar eclipse in 585 BC was described by Isaac Asimov as 'the birth of science'.  Thales also used his scientific knowledge to anticipate an especially plentiful olive harvest.  He bought options on all the olive presses in Miletus, and when demand soared he rented them out at a substantial profit.  According to Aristotle, Thales' motive was not primarily pecuniary;  he aimed to provide an answer to the question so often thrown at philosophers and economists:  'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

-John Kay and Mervyn King:  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Science...............................

Science tries to answer the question: ‘How?’ How do cells act in the body? How do you design an airplane that will fly faster than sound? How is a molecule of insulin constructed? Religion, by contrast, tries to answer the question: ‘Why?’ Why was man created? Why ought I to tell the truth? Why must there be sorrow or pain or death? Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

"We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance."

-Warren Weaver

When the answer is in the question......

What if happiness was the secret ingredient that makes being successful easier?

-Matthew Ferrara, from this post

Questions and answers.......................

The quality of the answers we get are directly correlated with the quality of the questions we ask.

We can learn a lot, often more, from the work involved in answering a question than from the answer itself.

There are no dumb questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them. They are the most straight forward path to learning.

-All from this Farnam Street post

All your questions.............................

....................................................................answered here.