InspireMeToday October 9 2013
Listen for your own deep questions and follow them. Let them guide you the way a compass guides a lost traveler, marking true north when there are no maps… or when the maps you have no longer show the way to where you want to go.
Listening like this is soul level listening. You have to be willing, or longing, or desperate enough to turn away from other people’s answers. You have to turn toward your unknown self. To take time.
Your question doesn’t have to look like a question. It can be a fragment of conversation you overheard on the bus yesterday or the line of a song that won’t go away. Or a poem. It can be something someone asks you. My friend Vanda asked me- Is there a map for growing old? It had an echo, that question. A reverberation that didn’t stop. I wrote a book to answer it.
A question can come from something you see and can’t make sense of. It can come from a memory or a set of memories or a photograph hanging on a wall. The year I turned 35, I went to Auschwitz and walked through its unspeakable rooms. I came to a room lined with photographs of faces, their eyes flashing terror. That’s how I would have been, I thought.