The questions underneath the questions

I’m working on a book about white parents and school integration. The seed of it started with an innocent-sounding question: where should we send our kid to school? And then I fell down a wormhole of strategic and spiritual questions that I’ve never really gotten out of. The book is due in December, so I’ll have to find an exit soon. Meanwhile, spoiler alert, it asks way more questions than it answers.  

It turns out, the most important question is not--where should we send our kid to school? The most important questions are: What is a school? How well can you ever really know your own kid? Who am I without other people’s pain? Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera. 

I share this, because I’ve been thinking that one way to understand the garbage fire that is 2020 is perhaps to think of it as a time of asking the questions underneath the questions. You might be doing it with some relief--yes, this is unsettling, but at least we are finally getting to the most fundamental questions of our existence. Or you might be doing it kicking and screaming--please, just take me back to a time when I had no idea what social distancing or AQI were! (Or maybe there’s a bit of both inside of you, which is probably true for most of us.)    

If you were in autopilot mode in 2019--looking around at your friends and colleagues, asking the same questions they asked without thinking too much about it, trying to get the best stuff for your family whenever and wherever possible--than 2020 just jackknifed your car off the road. 

Especially if you are White and economically comfortable, you have lost the luxury of innocence about some things--the urgency of climate change, the real threat of not having strong, medically-sophisticated leadership that can give clear directives in times of crisis, the brutal anti-Black violence enacted over and over again by our police, and so many other systems we have built and can rebuild. Maybe you treated these things--as I did in the case of climate change--as an abstract topic to be entertained when you had the bandwidth--a book here, a TED talk there. There’s no more “entertainment.” There’s no more abstraction. The fires--real and metaphorical--are coming for us all and we have to figure out how to face them together.

The ominous, red sun Tuesday morning on a hike in Berkeley. The air is terrible.

The thing about asking the questions underneath the questions is that it’s very inconvenient. It takes way longer. It’s complex on a level that can make our strategic brains short-circuit. It can mess up your whole day, plan, conception of your own identity. And there isn’t a lot of social support for it in a society that worships effectiveness and five-year plans. 

Case in point: if I had pitched a pithy parenting book about how to get your kid into the best school possible and be an effective anti-racist advocate in 10 easy steps, it would have been way easier to sell. I wouldn’t have risked alienating anyone (which I am aware of daily as I chip away at this sucker). I wouldn’t be tying myself in narrative and philosophical knots trying to get at something useful and true. But it would have been a lie, an exercise at the surface of some of our country’s oldest wounds in need of the deepest healing.

2020 is like that.                  

If you were playing around at the edges of not loving your job in 2019, now you can’t stop thinking about it. If the world is ending, you want to spend your days on earth immersed in your calling, not biding your time for a day that you’re not sure will actually exist. 

If you were feeling unsure about a relationship in 2019, now you can’t ignore it. You need to have the hard conversation. It might be healing and cathartic. It might blow the whole thing up. Either way, it’s feeling impossible to neglect in a time of such holistic acknowledgement and truth-telling. 

If you were unsatisfied with your connection to your neighbors or your sense of being a real part of your city--in all its beauty and brokenness--now you are really facing that reality. Staying off airplanes and refocusing your attention on the local. Reaching out. Sharing what you can. You are looking for new ways of being explicit about what you need from neighbors and friends and understanding what they need from you, creating models of real accountability, no longer leaving it up to chance and assumptions.  

Maya planning for her garden with her elder mentor, Louise.

If you had inklings about your complicity in white supremacy/patriarchy/neoliberal bullshit, now you have reckoning. It’s not just about “optics” anymore--the DEI consultants, the sexual harassment policies on the books, the pay gap awareness campaigns. It’s about doing things you’ve never done before so you can feel, in your bones, that you are breaking generational patterns of immorality and inequity. Reparations. Resignation. Making room. Asking for help.

This is hard. It pushes you to the edge of existential groundlessness. I’ve had so many moments this year when I felt like the questions on my brain and heart were too heavy to hold, the pain too great, the possibility of hurting people, of re-imagining my life beyond the point of recognition, too frightening. But it also pushes you past bullshit, past stagnancy, past delusion, deeper, deeper, into the most worthwhile questions of your one wild and precious life. This one wild and precious country. This one wild and precious planet. 

So tell me, what are your questions underneath the questions these dark and transformative days? 

And if you’re in the mood, check out Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg and I in conversation about her new book, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, tonight here. Registration required.