A Different Question

What if the most important question isn't what you want from life, but what life is asking of you?

Over the past few days I’ve noticed a different question beginning to appear. Not because I deliberately chose it, but because it seemed to arrive on its own. Perhaps that's how the most important questions always come.

For years I’ve found myself asking questions like, What kind of life do I want to create? or What is the next step? Looking back, those questions have served me well. They encouraged me to imagine living in nature long before I knew how it could happen. They helped me trust possibilities that made very little sense at the time. More than once, life unfolded in ways I could never have planned, and I’m deeply grateful for that.

Yet recently I’ve noticed that another question has quietly begun to replace those earlier ones. Instead of asking, What do I want from life?, I find myself wondering, What is life asking of me? Sometimes the question becomes even simpler: How can I be of service?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a while now, and what fascinates me is not so much the answer, but how different it feels in my body. One question seems to begin with me. It naturally invites planning, imagining and looking towards the future. The other seems to begin somewhere else. It gently turns my attention back to this moment and asks, What is needed now? Not next year. Not when everything is finally in place, but here, in this very moment.

That’s why the question feels beautifully peaceful. It doesn’t feel like giving myself away or ignoring my own needs, and It certainly doesn’t feel like self-sacrifice. Rather, it feels like participating in something larger than myself. There’s less grasping, less trying to make life fit the picture I have in my mind, and more curiosity about where life itself seems to be moving.

It also feels like a natural progression. The more I explore all of this, the less I feel the need to have life figured out. I’m becoming less interested in using my mind to direct every step and more interested in listening for what life itself seems to be asking. It's a quieter way of moving through the world—less driven by certainty, more guided by presence.

Perhaps this question naturally grows out of all of that.

If nothing is fundamentally missing, maybe life is no longer asking us to become somebody else. Maybe it's asking us to become available: available to listen more carefully, to love a little more freely, and to notice where life is quietly inviting us to participate.

I don’t think this means we stop dreaming or creating. A flower still turns towards the sun. Music still longs to be played. We still build homes, begin relationships, write books, teach classes and make plans. But perhaps the energy underneath those actions changes. Instead of creating because we’re trying to complete ourselves, we create because life naturally expresses itself through us.

I have no idea whether I’ll still be asking this question a year from now. Perhaps another one will take its place. But for now it feels alive, and I’ve learned to trust the questions that stay with me. They often seem to carry more wisdom than the answers I try to find.

In many ways, I think this is the conversation I'd most like to have with you in our upcoming Monthly Meeting. Not because I have a formula for creating the perfect life, but because I suspect many of us are discovering that a meaningful life is less about certainty than participation. Less about making life happen than learning to listen. Less about becoming someone new than allowing what is already here to express itself more fully.

If these questions resonate with something in you, I’d love for you to join me. We’ll spend two hours exploring them together through some gentle movement, breathwork, meditation, nervous system practices, reflection and conversation. Not in search of final answers, but with a willingness to listen a little more deeply to ourselves—and perhaps to life itself.

With love,

Esther

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