The Freshness of Life.

"The freshness of life not only lies in asking new questions, but in asking the right questions. And being really observant."

I was online with a friend the other night, and I said something like this.

Has living life ever felt boring, or stale to you? To quote a friend of mine, "If you're no longer learning, you might as well be dead." Life gets boring without asking new questions. Why? Because you stop learning. When you've exhausted all the wisdom you've accumulated, you stop being useful to others; you stop having an impact on people. If that happens, "you might as well be dead."

It might be a new question for you: to ask yourself and others one day, "What's my purpose here?" And can make for some interesting conversation. But asking a question as broad as that one will not give us the specific answer we're looking for. You might have the right idea, but usually, experiencing life with others will somehow get you to ask the right questions: questions you'd never ask yourself on your own -- not without the benefit of good and bad experience. In any and every kind of relationship with people, we're either guided to new questions, or we begin refining our old questions into the right questions.

And once the right questions have been posed, the answers present themselves. Not as clearly as you would like to, but they do present themselves: in circumstances that happen to you, through other people. This is why we need to be observant of answers that are not within us, but are all around us. The answers we hope for never come from a single source, but from a collection of experiences.

And it's up to us to be observant of the experiences. One of them is the missing piece to the puzzle. More often though, you come up with new questions.

That is what keeps life fresh.

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When you asking new questions, life never gets stale.
You work towards not only finding an answer, but towards finding the right answer.
The only way to get there is to ask the right questions.
When you get to the right questions, experiences will challenge those questions.
When you step back to observe the experiences, the answers start revealing themselves.
Better yet, new questions present themselves.

I wonder if that made any sense?