"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it, live your way some distant day in to the answers."

R.M. Rilke

The most powerful response to questions worth asking is often not answers, but questions. Questions worth asking cause us to question--who we are, what we're doing, where we're going. They help us find ourselves despite ourselves. They are the messengers of our discontents, and the gatekeepers of our dreams. Indeed, questions worth asking are worth asking precisely because they have the power to change our lives.

Questions worth asking are the questions we live. How did I get here? Where am I going? Is this all? Will I ever be happy? How can I make a difference? Most often, they are the undercurrents of our reflections pulling our lives in different directions while we're busy skimming the surface. We notice them in fleeting moments between waking and fully opening our eyes, standing in line and paying the cashier, the daily commute and the eight am meeting.

Like heartbeats or breathing, we are often unaware of the questions we are living until something happens to remind us. Frequently, we neglect the questions worth asking until we are in crisis. Then, we have no choice but to live the questions now. Crises plunge us beneath the surface and force us to choose between drowning in our own misery and changing the way we live. In the gaping hole between "before" and "after" when some life happening recalls life's meaning, we are reminded that there are questions worth asking.