Our questions matter

Maybe the uncertainty of 2021 (and 2020) is not pointing to clear answers, but perhaps is giving us something else we need: room to ask questions.

Last year on new year’s day, after a long 2020, I wrote about our need for magic and posed a couple of questions that stayed with me for most of past year:

What work has 2020 prepared us for? What awakening has begun? What magic is coming that we needed to be strong enough to carry?

As we start a third year of sustained uncertainty, after a somehow even longer feeling 2021, I have a different question:

What is all this uncertainty for?

As unsettling as it feels, maybe the uncertainty is somehow what we need.

That after a few hundred generations of building cultural momentum, that it might take a sustained period of breaking those habits, of questioning which ones we are wiling to pick back up, of feeling untethered and unsure to not simply snap back into the same paths and systems that are no longer serving us. Maybe it’s the uncertainty that makes certain other things possible, certain conversations more likely, certain questions more approachable,

I’m not going to claim some disingenuous, unbelievable preference for the uncertainty or suggest that it isn’t an almost unbearable state of being — especially on top of the weight and responsibilities of our everyday lives that feel even heavier. But perhaps it is something we need. Something we need to let teach us. Something we need to keep us open to new ideas. And if we need it, then we need to help each other stay in it, learn from it, get and stay willing to consider these new conversations, these new questions. Perhaps the uncertainty is only unbearable alone. Uncertain, together 2022 — let’s go.