Is A Question Ever Too Big?

What is the soul?

One year ago I set out to create a score that would inform the creation of as much of my work as possible over the next couple of years. One year into it this “score,” which has turned out to be more an evolution of questions than an actual score, has informed 5 new works: 2 solos, 2 group works, and an addition.

It all began with that question–What is the soul?–and the idea of cellular death and regeneration. The ideas of becoming new people, of evolving over our own lifetimes, of knowing ourselves (and not), of learning how to define oneself without any of the usual markers. The idea of asking a lot of questions and knowing answers will be impossible.

So, do we ask those questions anyway? Well, I did. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

1. Ask the questions regardless of whether you think there’s an answer.
2. You’re going to ask a lot of questions that you will try to find answers to.
3. When you don’t arrive at any answers to the first set of questions you’re going to ask tangential questions that aren’t really the ones you want answers to in the hopes that they will be easier to answer and lead you to the actual answers you want.
4. It will be a long process, kind of like that run on sentence you just read.
5. You’ll also find out it didn’t work. Duh. But you will still learn a lot.
6. You’ll make some work because of it, and it will be not so great. Whatever. You’re learning things.
7. You’ll ask a bunch of other people the same questions and they’ll be willing to answer some of them but will mostly be uninterested.
8. But then there will be others that want to see more and hear more and will make opportunities for you to do more.
9. Those are your people.
10. You will always regret beginning a project asking these questions and will always be thankful you did by the end.
11. You will eventually ask yourself is it worth asking the questions, or should I just sit back and observe all the things?
12. You will try to let go of the questions and just make work for the essence of what the questions hold.
13. You don’t know what happens yet because we’re just arriving at this point.
14. So, you will continue to make this work because it is important to you and if it’s important to you it will be important to at least one other person. For both of these reasons it’s worth continuing the work.

This week’s prompt is a question about questions. We like to think we have a lot of answers and if we don’t have them we can find them on Google. I can’t wait to hear what questions you don’t have the answers to. What if your question is the same as someone else’s?!