Forest and trees. Hide and seek. Inner truth and total objectivity. I like juxtaposition and irony, so I find it really interesting that, during our youth, we're told to "search out answers to the big questions" by folks who most often don't have answers themselves. Our parents tell us and we're also admonished by authors and so-called wise people to seek and find. I suppose they're simply trying to get us to think about things and not live an unexamined life. It's my experience that, once you think you have an answer to one of those big questions, you get a different answer a few years down the road.

For example, when I was twenty-one, I thought that it was so important that I be true to myself and do what I wanted to do in life. Now that I'm older and have a family, what I want to do is quite different. Then it was all about career and making money; now it's more about peace, contentment and security for my family. Perhaps those are two sides of the same coin, but how I view the coin is quite different. The important part is that I was using other folks questions, not my own. As I matured and became more conscious, I realized that I was answering the wrong questions because I hadn't thought enough about things to have my own.

Then there's that inner truth vs. total objectivity thing. We think we know what's best for ourselves; we believe that we really understand our situation or at least have a view from 10,000 feet that gives us a more global picture. Bull. It's almost impossible to be objective about ourselves if for no other reason than emotional self-defense is another form of self-preservation. If you think about it, we lie to ourselves to make sure we feel good enough about ourselves to continue to move forward...or at least move. We do have to trust ourselves, but we also need advisers who, by their own actions, have shown that they have a lot of good questions and answers themselves. Sometimes we get fooled and trust the wrong folks, but that gives us new info to ask better questions the next time.

So, what's my point? It's that we must decide what the questions are. Even though there are the universal questions (Who am I? What's my purpose here? Etc.), we have to decide what's important to us. What would you die for? What would you suffer for? Important questions and they are critical to becoming a whole person. The problem is that we are rarely asked to pose those questions because they're so dire and overwhelming and, when we must ask them, we are usually not in a position to think clearly; not at first, anyway. Besides, those are questions that we work on for the better part of our lives and the answers change with each decade or significant life event (like seeing your first child being born or truly falling in love the first time).

The important questions are asked in everyday situations. What do I like? Not just a question about fast food or movies, but lifestyle, climate, personalities, jobs and so on. Yes, it's good to seek answers to those ponderous, overarching questions, and they do provide a compass to navigate our life by, but they don't take care of the specifics of daily life. Without asking the everyday questions, we're apt to be unhappy very often. They're like the little moves of the steering wheel that keep us moving straight ahead vs. the right and left turns that take us in a different direction. A journey without those questions usually veers into the ditch. Sometimes, by asking the little questions, they add up to answers to the big questions and point us in a direction that we ultimately will be happy with; sometimes they give us the big questions themselves.

I see people all the time who let life wash over them and, now that it's later in their lives, they complain about their circumstance, about how unhappy they are, that they were cheated, etc., etc. They had no direction so the road of life took them someplace they didn't want to be. As the saying goes, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. The problem is that most folks don't like where they wind up." It boils down to being conscious of your life and the lives around you. That comes down to asking your own questions and constantly looking for new questions and answers. Question authority? Hell, question yourself.