Questions have a funny way of dissipating with age. As a kid, I remember being peppered with all sorts of questions.
What are you learning in school?
What do you wanna be when you grow up?
What grade are you in again?
Adults are amused by your chubby cheeks and all your youthful promise, so they engage with you. All you do is answer the questions, never bothering to ask the adults any questions yourself. After all, who cares what adults do for a living?
Once you start caring, I think that’s when you’ve become an adult. By that point, the questions about your life are exclusively about your current job.
How’s work?
How’s the new job?
What do you do again?
The questions have become narrower and increasingly focused on the present tense. What you’re doing now and how that’s going. Life is more or less set in stone. It’s promotions, marriage, a house, and a kid, the usual script.
And eventually, the questions more or less stop. You’re old, so why ask about what’s to come? It’s retirement, a nursing home, and the inevitable. Now, you’re the one asking questions. You’re asking the kids about what they want to be when they grow up, what they’re learning in school, and what sports they’re playing during lunchtime.
But every now and then, people ask you questions about your past.
I once heard a story about a woman asking her aging father-in-law about his favorite memory. Instead of answering the question, the woman’s father-in-law broke into tears and began talking about his biggest regret in life, which was that he didn’t push his oldest daughter hard enough to go to college. When so few questions come your way, you might as well answer the questions you want to answer.
On your deathbed, you’ll be confronted with the real questions. The real questions are on everyone’s mind, but it’ll be too rude for your loved ones in the hospital room to ask them. Instead, they’ll pat your hand awkwardly as they skitter around the existential dread in the room.
But those questions remain nonetheless. You’ll wonder why in the world you spent a lifetime avoiding the questions that mattered while answering the ones that didn’t. At the very end, you’ll find yourself like a child, trying to grapple with questions about a world that you know very little about.
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
Where am I going?