I cannot fathom the number of things that I don’t know and so I do not seek to find answers for everything. I don’t think I need to ask myself: what is the meaning of life? And that’s because I don’t believe there is an answer to that question that governs us all, or that will really matter at the end of the day. I only need to work on the answer to: what is the meaning of my life? And it will be less of an answer and more of a journey when my time is finally up.

I do ask a lot of ‘why’ questions, but I rarely expect answers from them because most of them are rhetorical, concerning the behaviour of the people who live in this world. I don’t have enough time in my life to dissect the behavioural patterns of others, only enough to ask with exasperation and try to move on in a way that might affect change or at least bring satisfaction to my way of living.

I don’t even search for answers in the way I write, and sometimes I don’t have answers to the questions that people ask about my writing. Sometimes “that’s just how I did it” really is the answer. Overthinking and dissecting questions can sometimes lead you closer to the truth, but it can also box the answer and restrict it like the English Curriculum in this country does to the work of artists. Don’t tell me it is up to interpretation and then give me the answer of interpretation. That makes no sense.

It’s suffocating to think that everything must have an answer, and so that’s why I only seek answers to questions I know have a truth. General things that can be explained in fact. Broad questions may lead to an answer that is a discussion or has a flexible face depending on where it is asked. Actual answers may not always live up to our expectations of what they should be, and I feel that it is more often than not that answers do not come by themselves. For example, the question “Why do you write?” has a few different answers for me, and though they are different, they are all correct. Asking me to narrow it down to a single sentence is asking me to share only a portion of the answer because it’s not so simple to respond to a question with only one reason. And so I often fall back on this answer “I just do”.

Sometimes you don’t need to find answers to some questions, sometimes you just need to find meaning.