In a culture infatuated with measurement and scientific method as pathways to objective truth, we are always in danger of forgetting that meaning is made by crafting personal answers to ultimately unanswerable questions. In his book, The Heart of Business, philosopher Peter Koestenbaum addresses a dozen such questions, which he calls personal ultimate concerns. A few examples: Do you respond to the certainty of your death with despair or with strength? Have you discovered a life task that is more significant and durable than you are? Where do you find security?

Sam Keen echoed Koestenbaum in Hymns to an Unknown God, telling of how he–Keen–replaced the crucifix that he had always worn around his neck with a question mark in response to Rilke’s words,

I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and 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 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 ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.

My genius–Creating Clarity–loves questions of all kinds. It is often momentarily fond of how-to questions, such as how to build a fence, how to hang a light fixture, how to assemble an authentic spaghetti carbonara, and how to replace a car battery. And it is transfixed in a more lasting way by questions for which we each must craft personal answers. I raised four such questions in my book, Is Your Genius at Work?: What is your genius? Is your genius at work? What is your purpose? and Is your genius on purpose?

In the past few months I raised two other such questions at this blog: For what has my life been preparing me? and What kind of me is my work creating? Friend Dave Pollard at How To Save The World joined the question party with this gem: Who needs your gift now? Such questions live closer to the soul than to the mind.

Koestenbaum, Keen and Rilke have it right for me. I often aspire to be someone who only asks questions: to be the person to whom others come, not to have their questions answered, but to find their own answers, or to have their current answers questioned.