What’s Your Beautiful Question?
Do you have a beautiful question that is perhaps shaping your life and bringing you into new circles and circumstances?
Last year, I had a series of encounters that have now come together magically as though they had been puzzle pieces planning to snap together all along.
First, I gave a commencement speech for Indiana Tech called “Nothing Is Wasted.” In this brief overture to young Warriors at Tech, I shared a personal story about what first appeared to be a real dead end career-wise for me and how it ultimately led me on a strange and wholly unexpected spaghetti pathway to here and now.
Around that same time, my friend and pastor, Rev. Dana Allen Walsh, and I began conspiring together on a podcast/book project very much connected with this same topic that we call, “A Life Worth Working.” We wondered aloud together: What if, instead of showcasing our college degrees, job accolades, and prestigious awards, our resumes dared to list our detours, dead-ends, failures, and employment gaps? What if that list of all the scraps and screw-ups of our careers is where the real seeds of possibility lie? What if nothing is wasted, and everything counts?
With this newfound shared curiosity, we now spend parts of our weeks interviewing unique people about the career pivots that led to them finding their most authentic selves, including a post-disciplinary artist, a death doula, and a comedy writer turned emergency medical doctor to name a few.
During the summer of last year, I was asked to deliver a guest sermon at my own South Church, a progressive church in Andover, Massachusetts. It was about finding — not our why but — our how: With a future ahead of us that is impossible for us to predict, I offered that finding our path in life is less about deciding what we will do and more about deciding how we will do it. Finding the how is about deciding which principles we will live by without fully knowing where the journey will lead.
This doesn’t mean that we just let the future happen to us. Instead, all moments — even the most mundane ones — can become key moments, in which we create and shape our everyday lives through how we serve and love one another. We get to choose to adhere to principles and values — an inner moral compass. We get to live with integrity, humility, compassion, and vulnerability. We have the privilege of caring for one another. Finding our how is about how we begin to shape a future that is as yet unknown.
In the fall, I was then selected to give a TEDx talk in my town, and I summoned all these experiences and questions I had been asking throughout the year to develop a talk called, “How to prepare for a good life of work.”
It’s a talk that weaves together connections between loneliness, lone work, the future of work, the need for authentic encounters at work, and the practice of empathy required to get us there.
What’s more, I returned to the same fork in the road that I had shared in my commencement speech. But I was able to uncover a newer insight from my past work as an English professor that could empower those seeking a sense of purpose even when our work doesn’t feel purposeful.
I look back and recognize the pattern, the sweet confluence of beautiful questions shaping who I am in this moment. And I can’t wait to keep asking more questions about belonging, authentic encounters, compassion, meaning, and purpose as I embark on some new work with the Kern Family Foundation, which centers on character formation, human flourishing, principled innovation, caring and compassion across the fields of K12 teaching, engineering education, medical education, faith, work, and economics.
David Whyte is spot on: We don’t necessarily have to answer these questions. Nor do we need to rationalize the pursuit of our questions. It’s enough to start with curiosity. We can keep asking and learning and asking again. And soon enough, we might find ourselves on paths we never could have envisioned for ourselves.
What a beautiful surprise.
Dr. Michelle Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and consults as an outsourced Chief Innovation Officer for businesses and higher education institutions. For more information, please visit: michelleweise.com.
Love this. Thanks, Michelle! Lots of resonances with Rilke's "live the questions" and more from Whyte: “One of the central necessities of this discipline of getting to know the unknown is in a sense being able to look for all of the invisible help in the world, which will not manifest itself in the near term, but somehow will actually come together in the larger story that you’re going to be a part of in following your own star.”
Love that you're doing this! Newer generations think they're the only ones who stopped out of jobs and tried different things. But it isn't all that new. My own journey took a lot of twists and turns.