Give the question room

The moment a question rises, the wish to settle it rises with it. Let an answer arrive, and the desk of the mind is clear; the next piece of work can begin. Yet there are questions we want to pack away before we have understood them. They show the ground beneath a belief, or they bring back the person about whom it is hard to speak. Then even a beautiful answer can become a means of covering something over in a hurry.

In the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa asks, as his third boon, about the doubt that arises concerning a man after death, and he puts it in words that leave nothing vague: there is this doubt about a man who has died, some saying he is, some saying he is not; this he wants to know, taught by Yama; of the boons, this is his third. Yama tells him how fine-grained the subject is and asks him to choose another boon. Offers of long life, wealth, and pleasures follow. Nachiketa holds to his question. He wants to know the very thing he chose for his third boon. The passage is 1.1.20 to 29; the teaching that follows has yet to begin.

A hard distinction shows itself in that pause. A good thing placed in front of us does not thereby become the answer to what we asked. Busyness, praise, comfort, a new plan, all of these can be useful. Still, at times the mind’s question stays exactly as it was. The relief of forgetting it and the beginning of understanding it are different experiences. While reading Nachiketa’s passage, some unfinished question from your own life may come to mind.

It does not have to be large or philosophical. Why do we fall silent again and again in a certain relationship? In the work we have given so many years to, what are we looking for now? If a decision leaves us uneasy, uneasy about what, precisely? Simply managing to write them down clearly enough can be useful in itself. Sometimes, while writing the question out, we discover that we had already placed our verdict inside it; the answer only had to confirm it.

Giving a question room does not mean turning it over in the mind at every hour either. Set it down on a sheet of paper. Beneath it, write as much as you know now; for what you do not know, leave empty space. Then consider who might help the understanding grow. Someone may listen. Someone may lead you to a text. Someone may state the limits of their own knowledge honestly. The three are useful in three different ways.

While listening to another person’s hard question, this is worth remembering all the more. Our consolation can run ahead of their experience. In the haste to supply a meaning, it is also possible that we never heard them out. Sometimes the honest sentence is this: I do not know the answer yet; if you want to say more, I can listen. There is an unfinished quality in such a sentence, and the door to the conversation stays open.

Turning Nachiketa into nothing more than an example of stubbornness would also be a small reading. His purpose in holding to the question is to know; a refusal of every possible answer was never part of it. Keep that difference close. There is a distance between being ready to test an answer and being determined never to accept one. Perhaps this is all today’s reading has to do: let one question come clear, do not choose something else in its place right away, and keep the possibility of learning alive.