Yesterday at the latest “Yellow” session we were, to quote Steve Chapman (our podcast here), “playful with not knowing”, flowing towards a space of being comfortable with not knowing, a space that allowed me to flow with the idea of “question storming”. The idea of question storming is to simply ask one question after the other flowing from one to the next. It worked beautifully for me yesterday as I was ready to simply allow each question to flow from the previous one without seeking the answers to any of them. In other words, I had become “comfortable with not knowing”.
In my case, the first question I wrote on my sheet of paper was a personal one about a specific issue. The flow of subsequent questions that flowed out through my hands and pen to the page were first introspective, then almost philosophical in context, leading me to the idea of “to be happy, first be grateful” as I wrote about here.
After that wonderful exercise, I went back to a blog from Steve Chapman called: “Yugen and the art of the intangible takeaway“, a beautifully written piece right in his “not knowing” space of deep expertise. I loved this passage from the post in particular:
Yugen is a Japanese word that has no English equivalent. I understand it to mean a momentary sense of experiencing the deep mystery of all things. An awareness of some meaningful connection or patterning that is beyond words but is a palpable experience nonetheless. Philosopher Alan Watts best describes the paradoxical nature of yugen as “A moment that provokes something in your imagination but you don’t attempt to define it or pin it down. Because to do so would make it no longer yugen!” There are no tangible takeaways or discernible actions arising from an experience of yugen. In fact any attempt to pursue it in such a way destroys the very thing you are trying to pursue.
Steve then flowed even more into the “zone” with this paragraph, expressing eloquently the power of questions:
An exclamation mark is a question mark with rigor mortis. An answer is the cadaver of a question. Its inherent mystery has been pursued and drained in such a way that there is no creative life left in it. And whilst the feeling of concreteness that an answer gives is certainly helpful in our day to day lives (to reduce our anxiety if nothing else) this endeavour habitually sabotages moments of not knowing. Moments of experiencing the fertile void. Moments of yugen. Creative moments that are potentially helpful in our exploration of what it means to be human.
I love a good question, and, through the exercise with Yellow yesterday, I was reminded in new ways of the power of questions that are asked without then immediately seeking to answer them by being comfortable, or even “playful” with not knowing.