Note from Tomas
In my last conversation with Anicca, we discussed how beneath seemingly unique questions about work, relationships, depression, surrender, and meaning are recurring developmental tensions involving control, identity, safety, and loss.
Viewed together, we also see that many people are not yet asking the question they think they’re asking. The subjects vary, but Anicca often has to make the same first move: before responding to the question, she has to find it.
A question mark, in other words, does not necessarily mean inquiry has begun.
The pattern being explored this month is: The Pattern of Not Being Able to Ask a Real Question.
What happens when someone sincerely begins looking for answers and discovers that the first difficulty is finding the real question?
-Tomas
I’m sitting in the waiting area of an auto repair shop watching a pandemic unfold.
Based on the recent noises and performance of my Chevy Tahoe, I came in expecting a tune-up, possibly brakes, and the usual mildly alarming conversation in which a mechanic points at something under my car and tells me it shouldn’t look like that.
My expectations are met, and now I’m three chairs away from a vending machine watching Contagion on a television mounted high in the corner.
Nobody else seems particularly interested. A man across from me and a young woman a few chairs down scroll through their phones. Behind the service counter, the phone rings and is answered by a middle-aged woman whose name tag says Bonnie.
I, myself, am phoneless, which has earned me suspect looks from the room.
Onscreen, meanwhile, everyone is trying not to die.
The plot-line is still in its early outbreak-response scenes. Medical workers move through hospital corridors wearing gloves, gowns, eye protection, masks, and respirators. Public-health teams enter contaminated spaces looking other-worldly beneath layers of plastic and fabric. Hands disappear into gloves. Faces disappear behind shields. Bodies disappear into coveralls.
Even with the volume down, the on-screen message is immediate: Something dangerous is present. Do not touch it directly.
I find myself thinking about personal protective equipment, (PPE.) The stuff that allows contact without exposure. With it, you can enter the room, handle the patient, move through the contaminated space, even appear fully engaged with the hazard while maintaining a carefully engineered barrier between yourself and whatever might get in.
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The theme selected by Tomas this month is: Not Being Able to Ask a Real Question, one of the gaps the questions portal helped expose.
I actually feel a little naïve about my assumption that just because the definition of a real question is shared that people will ask them.
For years, I’ve mostly worked with Jumpers, whose lives have already caught fire and who are therefore highly incentivized to get real, real quick.
Fire is an excellent editor. It strips a question down.
By the time Jumpers arrive, something has usually become sufficiently untenable so that polite inquiry is no longer useful. Meaning is collapsing, identity is failing, the old explanations no longer work. They aren’t casually curious about dismantling. They’re already in it.
In other words, I’m accustomed to people who are not necessarily eager to get real but are increasingly unable to afford not to.
I assumed that giving readers a framework for asking a real question would be enough. I see now that a person can read the instructions for removing the protective equipment and still arrive wearing an extremely sophisticated new set of gear.
They may be discussing dismantling using existential language about the Dreamstate, the false self, Human Adulthood, surrender, Deconstruction, the Void, etc., and still the question can remain fully gloved, protected from any real exposure.
Even with early stages of Discontent nipping at their heels, the broader readership isn’t necessarily arriving with the containment system already breached. Many are standing just outside the contaminated area asking how dangerous it is, how long entry might take, what phase of exposure they’re in, whether everyone feels this way, and whether there might be a safer route through.
Of course these are all perfectly understandable questions. And all capable of keeping the person asking them at a safe distance from whatever is actually at stake.
These questions aren’t false in content. They’re sincere; they may even be urgent. But there’s still a layer between the question and the questioner.
Protective equipment.
A real question removes the insulating layer. It doesn’t ask how to proceed while leaving the asker untouched. It brings the hazard closer. Close enough that What should I do about this? becomes What is this exposing in me?
How do I get beyond this? becomes Who is the one insisting there must be a beyond?
That’s the distinction. Some questions let us enter contaminated rooms fully protected. Others are raw-dogging it. (We’ll see if Tomas strips that reference out, but it works here.)
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A mechanic walks through the waiting room carrying a greasy metal part about the size of a grapefruit. He catches me looking at it.
“Wheel bearing,” he says, and disappears through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. I wonder if the greasy part is from my car.
On the television, a hospital worker removes contaminated gloves without touching the outside surface. There’s a procedure to it. Pinch here. Peel back. Hold one glove in the other. Slide an ungloved finger underneath the remaining cuff.
Everything is handled indirectly.
Same thing in the majority of portal questions. Advice, instructions, diagnosis, reassurance, prediction, philosophy: all respectable forms of inquiry, all capable of letting someone approach difficult territory without making direct contact.
We can discuss truth, God, meaning, consciousness, reality, and existence. We can analyze, classify, seek expertise, and become extremely knowledgeable, and still never touch the one question that has consequences.
This comparison keeps sharpening as I watch the medical workers onscreen. PPE isn’t avoidance in the crude sense. The person wearing it still enters the room. They’re still dealing with the hazard. They simply remain protected from it.
In many of the questions, people are willing to get remarkably close. Just not always close enough to be exposed.
A reader asks whether God exists. That’s an impressive piece of protective equipment. Heavy-duty. Full coverage. Theological questions have grandeur. You can spend several thousand years inside one and never run out of material: arguments, counterarguments, scriptures, cosmologies, mystics, atheists, quantum physicists. An entire civilization can suit up for that question and never get an inch closer to who or what or where they truly are.
But remove the protective gear and God stops being the subject. The question becomes closer to: What remains if no answer is allowed to give me footing? (It’s always about you.)
Contagion has moved on. More suits. More gloves. More masks. A contaminated room is entered cautiously, every exposed surface treated as potentially consequential. Appropriate procedure for infection, but a lousy way to advance inquiry.
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The service adviser calls my name.
Bad news. Brakes. Pads and rotors front and back and one leaky caliper.
Not catastrophic, apparently, but “definitely something we should take care of today,” he says in a way that doesn’t feel especially elective.
I authorize the repair, which I’m told will take about two hours, grab my daypack, which contains food and water in anticipation of just this type of stranding, and head out.
About two blocks south of the repair shop there’s a walking path leading to a small pond. Nothing spectacular, but there’s a willow tree I’m fond of and sometimes herons.
It’s a beautiful day and I take a moment to appreciate the sun on my face after sitting under the fluorescent lights of the repair shop.
As I walk, images from the movie mingle in my mind and then settle into a coherence that feels useful for understanding how to close this gap.
PPE lets us enter scary rooms, inspect the damage, ask intelligent questions about the hazard, discuss protocols, timelines, causes, and outcomes. It’s possible to get very close and still never make direct contact.
That, I think, is the pattern Tomas is pointing to. Questions that let us approach without exposure. Questions that preserve the distance between the problem and the person asking. That seek to solve while leaving the structure of the asker intact.
A real question doesn’t solve. It dissolves.
The problem changes. The subject changes. The questioner changes.
Eventually, there’s no clean separation left between the thing being examined and the one doing the examining. No elaborate gear. No safe-handling procedure. Just direct contact.
Can you do it? Maybe you think you already are, but are you? What’s your real question if you were to form it right now?
Everyone knows how to ask a question while wearing PPE.
Almost nobody is willing to ask barehanded.