The Answer is the Question

I took an online class recently. It was perfect. I learned that there is no such thing as perfect and that if you are waiting for perfect, you will be waiting a long time.

It is not new news. I have said for years that my father’s only standard was perfection and there is no such thing as perfect. It is a subjective experience. When you grow up in a house of black and white where perfection is the goal, it can take a long time to off load that belief system from the center of your soul. Getting things intellectually is much faster, but in another moment of proving the point, getting it intellectually is the problem.

In Zen thinking, we do not find the answers, we drop the questions. That made me stop and think which again is not the point.  Just get it and move on. It bears repeating. If you are looking for the answers, drop the questions.

If you observe yourself for a few days or just a few minutes you might be surprised the number of unkind, judgmental, polarizing comments that fly through your synapses. It is our heads that ask the questions that cause us the most hurt. To be at peace you must stop the pain and most of the pain comes in question form.

Why did they leave me? Why did they die? Why don’t they love me? Where should I go?

Trauma is not the circumstances; it is how you process it. What is overwhelming to one is not much at all to someone else. It is our perception of things that causes the upset.

Your partner cheats on you. You are devastated. Why did they do this? There can be a long list of beliefs and behaviors that justify your position and none of them would be wrong. They do, however, make you feel miserable and rejected and dismissed and bereft. What if instead of inquiring into “why,” you instead were grateful that you now knew something about the other’s character that you did not know previously. That they had done you a favor of showing you something about them that had been previously hidden. Now you have more information to move forward. You could remain with them or you could leave. You could see that they did not do anything to you, but rather they did something that you find unacceptable. You could view it as a time saver because now that you know, you leave rather than staying longer. You can get on with things. Head out into a life with new people and adventures. There is no life behind us, only memories but there is nothing but life in front of us.

Trauma is all the rage these days. It happens to many of us, but it affects each of us differently. It is within our own power how we choose to react and process the event or events. That statement alone is interesting because when we are traumatized, we believe or behave as if we are powerless and yet we are the only one with the power to process the event. How it is dealt with determines whether it will be encased in amber and brought out as proof or if it will it be processed and relegated to an event rather than a reason.  It has been pointed out that you could track trauma back to the first humans on this earth and “the reason” that it exists. Someone’s parent did something that caused them to believe something that caused them to do something or behave someway that has traveled through the millennia to us.

What is the point of that paragraph? It is to again point out that asking “why” is not the most helpful approach. Why it happened will not change it. Why can only serve to make you crazier, sadder, more conflicted because if you believe you have figured out why, then you open the box of so many more whys. So, to be at peace you should stop asking the questions that you believe will bring you peace.

If you believe that the questions will lead you to the perfect answer, look at life.  Those that believe, as my mother did, that close enough is good enough often are the most successful people. They get on with life. They are the real doers of the world. They are the inventors and entrepreneurs that gave it a shot, took the risk and tweaked the idea as it grew. Amazon was started in Jeff Bezo’s home. It was an interesting idea to sell books. It was not a fleshed out company with a huge plan. It was an idea that had potential and he was willing to dive in and find out where it would go. Most great successes are just that ideas that have potential but are not perfect. Risk takers do not live by paralysis by analysis, they get the idea or opportunity and they go. Some of the ideas work and some don’t but along the way there is creativity and creation and life. Now that sounds perfect.