The Eternal Return of Questions

Some mornings I wake up already mid-thought, like my mind kept walking while I slept. Not toward anything, exactly—just pacing. The question I fell asleep with resurfaces before my eyes even open. It has no new answer, but it returns as faithfully as breath. A strange comfort: to be haunted not by ghosts, but by inquiry.

There’s a pattern to these questions. They orbit. Disappear for a while, then drift back in disguised forms. “What am I doing with my life?” becomes “Is this enough?” becomes “Would I recognize peace if I had it?” They change costumes, but not essence. Like light refracted through time.

Answers, on the other hand, are cowardly. They rarely stay put. The ones I trusted at twenty have become hollow at thirty. Truth ages poorly. It sheds skin, then masquerades as something wiser. Maybe this is why I distrust conclusions—they feel too much like ceilings.

Some people collect answers like trophies. I collect questions like old books with marginalia—underlined, dog-eared, annotated with mood. Questions are not signs of confusion. They’re signs of attention. You don’t interrogate what you’ve already abandoned.

The right question doesn’t resolve—it expands. It holds a door open in the mind. It lets in air. Sometimes it even lets you leave.

We tend to seek closure like it’s a virtue. But I think closure is a kind of small death—the end of curiosity, the surrender of wonder. I’d rather sit with the ache of not-knowing than make peace with a lie that rhymes.

There’s something beautifully inefficient about not arriving. You loop. You rephrase. You dig through language like a miner who knows the gold isn’t in the finding, but in the sifting.

What do you do with the questions that don’t go away?

You let them grow moss. You let them become part of the architecture of your mind. You revisit them not to solve—but to remember who you were when you first asked.

Maybe we never get answers.

Maybe we just become better at carrying the weight of the question.