Just One Question
Imagine a world where you had to step up to a gate and get permission to enter the new year. There you are in the line outside your designated gate, with all the other people in your group—some you know, but most you don’t.
The old year lies behind you, quickly being shrouded in dusk, the sunset already fading into darkness. When the gate opens, you get a glimpse of sunlight, but then it closes again, and the light is gone, even though the promise of it lingers.
The line is moving so slowly, you grow anxious for your turn, because you won’t be able to start the new year until you go through.
You’ve been at the gate before, of course—every year since you were about twelve years old. All you had to do then was make a simple New Year’s resolution. But each year as an adult, you are faced with questions that grow ever more profound, and you have to be able to answer them satisfactorily in order to progress.
What have you learned in the past year? What have you attempted but failed? Have you been a good friend? Performed a kindness without expecting a return? What have you done to make the world a better place? What do you hope for the new year? What do you want to experience? What do you treasure most about the last year, and what are you looking forward to the most in the new?
Ah, but the possibilities are endless. No one knows what the questions will be, because each person is asked questions meant only for them. Sometimes your friends have had similar questions, but never at exactly the same time, and the answers were rarely the same. Even your life partner does not face the same questions at the same time as you do.
You feel both dread and eagerness to reach the gate. To hear the questions. To search your heart to find the truest answers. The answers that will pay the ransom required to greet the new year—or not.
There are people whose answers are inadequate, who are turned away. You’ve seen them, making their way back down the long queue of people to take their place at the end, and slowly, so slowly, approach the front, again. You have heard of some people who have gone to the end of the line time after time, their next year ever out of reach, their lives in limbo. Will you be one of them, this time? Will you be turned away?
If only there was a way to prepare for the questions, you think. But there is no guide to study, no list of notes you can buy online to memorize answers, because the answers come from within you.
You take another step forward, grateful that the questions come only once a year. The last few years there have been rumors that the process will be changing. What if it is instituted more frequently, and you are required to face the questions to enter each new month, each day?
How could that be, you wonder? How could there possibly be so many questions? Questions so individualized, yet so important that you could not move forward until you found an answer true and meaningful enough to pull you onward. Or would the questions remain the same, but your answers change?
The line grows shorter ahead of you, and you are torn between the dread and the eagerness to see what the new year holds. Sometimes you have entered the year expecting something fresh and new and exciting, only to find more of the same old things from the year before. Other times you have stepped through hoping to find the familiar, but discovered that everything had changed, and the things you most valued from the year before were not to be found.
Only recently have you begun to suspect that the way you respond to the questions might determine what you find in the future. You are starting to realize that the path leading forward is shaped by what you discovered in yourself as you sought answers to the question.
As you move forward again, a quiet murmur is beginning to pass down the line, like far-off thunder, or the quivering of leaves as a breeze passes over a wooded hillside. You strain to hear what is being said, as people turn to each other with a look of undeniable surprise on their faces. Surprise, and something else. Fear? Bewilderment? Confusion? A hush follows the murmur, as if everyone is now afraid to speak.
The line seems to be frozen, with no movement at the front.
Then, one by one people step up to the portal, pause, and then turn back and begin to make their way back to the end of the line. What has happened? Have the questions changed? Are there no right answers? Why is no one moving on?
The dread is definitely winning out over eagerness, now.
Unable to stand it, you reach out and grasp the arm of someone as they pass you on the way to the end. Slowly, they raise their eyes to yours.
“What happened? Why is everyone being turned away? Are there no right answers?” you ask, your voice a strangled whisper.
They are clearly baffled beyond words, but finally they speak.
“We are at the turning point, the gatekeeper told us. They said we have been looking for answers all this time, but that will not be true in the future, because our answers were dependent on the question someone else asked for us.
“From now on, we will be required to ask the questions ourselves. It is up to each of us to ask the question most important to lead us into the future, to know what answers we should be seeking. And so far, no one has asked the right question…”
What is your question for this new year?
What is leading you onward?
Or in a new direction?
What answers will you be searching for?
HOLD THAT THOUGHT…or share it in the comments box below.
