On Questions

The mathematician Johann von Neumann once said, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”

It’s obvious to me that von Neumann appreciated something very fundamental about life. That being said, I kind of wonder if he was ever truly able to reconcile himself to an existence of acceptance without understanding. If so, I wish I could ask him how.

I now have to make my confession – by most people’s standards, I think too much. Yes, it’s kind of annoying to some (especially my close friends and my sister, who is tiring of my incessant attempts at analysis), but it’s always been in my nature. I am, to be quite honest, more of an observer of life than a participant. The background has always felt more comfortable to me than it’s more glamorous and highly coveted counterpart. Popularity, although I aspired to it at some point, has in truth never suited me at all. I think – I hope – that I have finally reached the point where I am able to accept that it’s just as legitimate to be a watcher as it is to be a doer.

This tendency sentences me to the endless task of trying to reach an illusory goal. I know it’s futile, but it’s as addictive to me as shoes or espresso. I simply can’t exist without it. Growing up, the most consistent thing people said to me in the way of unsolicited advice is that I was “too intense”. It’s off-putting to many. If I separate myself from myself, I can see how my ceaseless rumination and scrutiny can be truly tiresome. (Certainly my ex-boyfriend found it so; I think I simply exhausted his patience). As one friend recently told me, I am “too much in my own head”. Maybe it’s narcissism. I prefer to label it sensitivity to the hundredth power.

This begs the question: what has all of this taught me? The answer, of course, is absolutely nothing. This makes it sound like it has been a supreme waste of time and energy. And maybe it has. But it’s the single lesson I am most grateful for in this life.

I have been able to create a sort of rough outline, an ever-evolving philosophy applicable to my own life and experience, and it is this: chaos theory reigns supreme. Things don’t happen for “a reason”. That statement is, to me, an attempt to create order in a world where there simply is none. (A caveat: I am speaking only for myself here. I would never presume to make a generalization about anyone else’s life, beliefs or value system). Believing that there is some master plan behind things may make for a more palatable reality, but as it applies to my own life, I think it’s an extended exercise in self-delusion. I cannot see things as “meant to be”, because that statement necessarily assumes that something higher has made that value judgment. And that’s simply not a concept I can live with. Objectivity may be a lofty goal, but it’s one that does not exist in the realm of humanity as I have experienced it.

This isn’t to say that we should not try to structure the chaos. As much as I personally believe that it is impossible, I also know on a visceral level that as people we could not survive without earnestly continuing the attempt. So we assign meaning to the things that happen. We create some purpose for our struggles. We have to do so in order to survive. The cerebrum demands it of us. And I think it’s as beautiful as it is useless. I am not a religious person, but that is the only God I know of.

Several years before my mother died, she sent me a card with a quotation from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“..try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Well, I simply cannot help searching for the answers, Mom. But I’m growing to like living the questions a little better.