At the altar of Questions

I often find myself wandering through the worlds of art, literature, and music, lingering over the lives of artists and the questions they leave behind. Perhaps the mind is built for such wandering. It keeps searching for answers that retreat from us like the golden deer in the Ramayana — beautiful from a distance, elusive up close.

Questions seem eternal. Answers rarely endure for long. Every answer, sooner or later, feels incomplete before the weight of another question.

What is it that we truly want? Security? Love? Recognition? Power? None of these remain steady for very long. Everything shifts. And yet we spend so much of our lives trying to stand on ground that is constantly moving beneath us.

Perhaps compromise is what sustains ordinary life. We compromise quietly, almost daily, until it becomes difficult to tell whether we have chosen these lives freely or merely learned to accept them.

And still, somewhere within us, remains the desire to let go completely — to live without fear, without calculation, without the constant instinct for self-preservation.

But we are frightened of loss. Frightened of uncertainty. Frightened, finally, of death itself. So we learn to speak of compromise as though it were wisdom.

What is it that we truly need at this moment? I do not know. The question remains, waiting somewhere beyond language, and I find myself standing before it once again.

I am waiting at your altar, O' higher one.