Questions with no answers

I’m staring at this blank “sheet” of paper — this virtual white canvas glaring back at me, taunting me with its vagueness. This page has been sitting in front of me not for minutes, nor hours, but for a lifetime. It is a blank page that will always appear as I try to make sense of what my childhood meant and what my relationship with this childhood means now. If my life was a YouTube video, what would the time stamps mean as individual events or as a culmination of my experience? Can failures and successes be put through the meat grinder of reductionism and be turned into a mince of parental, or lack thereof, love and nurturing? How deterministic is our life? How far does the apple fall from the tree? These are the sort of questions you don’t tend to ask yourself if your childhood seemed rosy even without any tinted glasses. On the other hand, if your childhood is a hazy affair, one in which you tend not to draw too much energy from, then these questions haunt you on the daily.

Whether you ask yourself these questions, or someone asks these questions to you, their formulation isn’t the issue. The issue is that for most of these questions there are no answers. Some questions are asked to weave out information, others are pronounced to create a connection between people. These are not questions for action, these are questions for self-reflection. Many people refuse to ask themselves these very questions, sometimes because the answers may be too damaging. Unfortunately, most of the time, we do not ask ourselves these questions because there is no answer. You can spend…