🌿 Beautiful Questions Series
Love the damn questions. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s words from "Letters to a Young Poet" are some of my favorites ever written.
Fall in love with the game, the points will come. Only by living the questions now can you ever hope to live into the answers. It is as simple and beautiful and terrifying as that. It's also quite hard.
Why Questions?
We live in a world obsessed with certainty. I get it. I seek it too. We all do. But is all that certainty really what's best for us? True understanding rarely emerges from the comfort of easy answers. It is forged in the crucible of asking better questions.
Questions matter. Insightful ones shift your perspective. Probing ones reveal what you're avoiding. Challenging ones stretch your assumptions, cut through noise, and force you to think differently. But the most necessary questions are the ones that make you uncomfortable. They expose the truths you've learned to ignore. They reveal not just what you think, but how you think — and sometimes, how you need to think differently. These are beautiful questions.
Beautiful questions enlarge the context in which you're living. They deepen your horizon by taking you out of yourself and then back into yourself — over and over again. This rhythmic provocation — in and out, in and out — disturbs the usual mix. It rattles the furniture and shakes loose insights that were either hiding in plain sight or buried far out of view. And when it does, a beautiful question becomes the spark that sets those truths free.
Asking beautiful questions, resisting shallow certainties, and living with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to not know is to choose, again and again, the deeper, harder work of inquiry.
Beautiful Questions: Collected Essays
This series is a living archive of beautiful questions arranged by theme. Each edition explores a different terrain of the human experience: love, growth, change, meaning, identity, our relationships with ourselves and others.
Some editions borrow from the great masters of inquiry — Proust, Nabokov, Whyte. Others are drawn from beloved books and the hard-earned insights of lived experience. They are all meant to be returned to and revisited again and again.
A contemporary take on the most enduring personal questionnaire of all time.
Beautiful questions that press on the parts of you that ache for meaning but settle for motion.
Beautiful questions on the soul's inquiry into a deeper life drawn from Whyte's poems, prose, and lectures.
Beautiful questions for becoming someone who doesn't just make choices, but understands what's being chosen between.
Beautiful questions to help us recognize when we're lying, understand when we're lost, and know when we're still asleep.
Beautiful questions that show us who we are and help shape who we're becoming.
Beautiful questions for seeing through both the mirror and the window.
Strange, sensual, and revealing beautiful questions for the immodest and curious.