Posing Important Questions, by James Hollis

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During this past week I did thirty some radio interviews in connection with this book What Matters Most.  Many of the hosts made the obvious point that it was the first full week of the new year and for many is a time for resolutions.  And a few further observed that a book that raises questions about what matters most is also arriving at a timely moment when our national life seems also so vexed, so confused, and so disappointing.  

 Is it not noteworthy that periodically we reexamine our lives and vow to live them differently?  While we may be deeply in pain at the moment, or dealing with some consequence which has washed up on our shores, even more, are we not at those moments already in contact, however fleetingly, with something within that wishes to live more fully in the world?  What is it that has brings people into analysis?  Is it only suffering, powerful as that may be, or is it also that we intuit something which wishes fuller expression than we have allowed until now?   Jung wrote once that every therapist should ask, "what is this person's neurosis allowing him or her to avoid"?   He also observed that, deep down, everyone who came to him "knew" what it was they needed to do with their life.  I am inclined to concur even as we acknowledge that often we do not know what we already know.   But something in us always knows, and is always wishing to break through our resistance into the world through the choices we make, the lives we construct.

I have long believed that the depth, magnitude, and integrity of our lives is a direct product of the kind of questions we have come to ask.  When we are children, we necessarily ask: who will take care of me?  How can I stay out of harm's way? what do I need to do to get you to like me?   Understandable as these questions are, when they get locked into provisional identities, conditioned responses, routinized marching orders, they infantilize our lives and keep them narrowed and hugging the shore of the same old, same old.  Yet, as existential theologian Søren Kierkegaard once observed, merchant vessels hug the shoreline, but men o' war open their orders on the high seas.  

The second half of life is surely a summons to sail the high seas of uncertainty, wonder and terror, and larger, much larger questions.  I am moved and guided by the reminder of poet Rainer Maria Rilke that our task is to continue to be defeated by ever-larger things.  Well, who wants to be defeated?  But his point is compelling.  Ever-larger defeats means that we are finally taking on our lives, addressing its mystery and its challenge, and in so doing we leave the old secure ports in search of the new.  Novelist Andre Gide similarly reflected that in order to move to the new, we have to be out of sight of the old shores for some time.   When we do this, our life takes on a depth and personal flavor not possible in the older patterns.  Life then, in the words of playwright Christopher Fry, becomes "soul-sized."

In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote: "Life has addressed a question to me; I myself am a question."  So, what is the question life has addressed to you, to me?   What is the question we embody and are asked to bring more fully into this world?  

Asking what matters most asks us to respect what has always lain within as a set of possibilities, insists that we live larger questions, and allows us to experience this essential experiment, this angst-riven journey more fully. The work we do on ourselves is in service to the world around us as well, for no relationship, no social group, no democracy can be any more evolved than what the individual brings to it.  So this work is not just ours; it is our obligation to others as well.    

 
James Hollis, What Matters Most, Gotham Books, Penguin Books