Express Yourself
How ‘One True Question’ Will Clarify Your Life’s Purpose
Your personal question will illuminate what’s most important to you
I have a friend, the poet, scholar, and leader Laurie Patton, who asks her students “What is your one true question?” She intends, I think, to help them find the place of their deepest curiosity. The question that comes up for them over and over again and that can never reach a definitive answering spot. The one that is endlessly fascinating.
It might be “Am I loved?” or “What are the guiding laws of nature?” or “Who am I?” or “What does G-d want from me?” It might be “How shall I live?” or “To whom do I owe allegiance?” or “What does it mean to be Jewish/a woman/the child of a coal miner/Deaf?” or even “How do I fill the emptiness of my being?” It might be the question Ta-Nehisi Coates asks in Between the World and Me: “How do I live free in this Black body?” Or the question I heard over and over as a child: “Is it morally permissible to feel joy after the Holocaust?”
When we look inward to discover our own question, we are looking for a core dissatisfaction that animates our thinking and that drives us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Alain Badiou, in the preface to After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux, tells us that…
