Questions

We are haunted by different questions at various stages of our lives. When we are young, some of the more vivid questions that stood out seems to be "When do I become an adult?" "When can I decide things for myself?" etc.

When we were older, at adolescence, we muse about particular problems, things like "how to get back at the idiot?" or "how to woo that pretty girl?" These seem rather important at that point of time, and the questions we had at childhood faded into inconsequentiality by comparison.

As we grow even older, we move into abstraction, wondering about what love is, wondering about why we have to do exams, and why people are such jerks. And at the background of it all, there is the question of what life is really about, playing on like a soft trumpet just at the edge of hearing.

The questions never seem to get answered, but nevertheless we gradually lost them, and moved on to other questions. Questions like "what is the role of money" in my life, and "how the hell do I get more of them?" seem really important now. Especially the latter question, which is rather independent of how you answer the former.

Predictably, some of the questions will haunt us for the rest of our lives, and as we grow even older, a question that pops up every now and then will stand out even more ostensively: what is Death to us? That question could really mean a lot of things, like what does it feels to be dead, or just before death; it could mean how the prospect of being dead sits with us; it could mean what is our reaction to seeing the people around us dying before us (or for the pessimists, our reaction to the possibility that we might be the first to go instead).

Do we really have an answer to any of the questions? Maybe. We do seem to have ready answers to the childhood questions, which are respectively "Legally, 21", and "Probably never." The answers to the other questions appear less obvious. Instead of answering them, we just decide at one point of time that certain questions just don't deserve answering anymore, either due to a change of perspective, or a change of priorities.

With that in mind, and the fact that we are moving inexorably into the future, perhaps there is one thing we should safely conclude: that all questions eventually doesn't matter anymore, and so we should stop fucking around with them, and get down to making life miserable for the idiot in adolescent period.