A Common Complaint

While I've come up with answers to most of life's big questions, that's not to say that I've run out of other interesting ones. Some of these still don't have any satisfactory answers, while others are fun to wonder about for days on end.

The answers, pretty much, are never as interesting as the act of questioning, which is another of those entertainments that's falling out of favor. As much as ever, I guess, people think that just because they can ask something that there's an answer, and, worse, that every question has a simple answer.

I, along with just about everybody else, have long since found answers for all the simple things. The trouble is we've all gotten spoiled by those and have come to believe every question has a simple answer. While some things may result from a single, identifiable cause, I think we expect too much when we think everything should be so easily solved. It makes sense that a brick breaks because we hit it with a very heavy hammer, but why we fall in or out of love isn't quite so simple.

And, yet, we often look for a single, simple answer for all of our questions or problems. Worse, again, is that if we're faced with a problem, we'll stop asking once we find an answer that isn't impossible. If we ask why some jerk drives like a maniac, we'll stop asking once we come up with an answer we find satisfactory, the same way we stop looking for the match to an orphan sock once we find its mate. When we look for something physical, like that sock or missing car keys, we stop when we find it (usually in the last place we look), and we carry that practice into intellectual questions even though the two activities aren't really analogous.

When we find an answer to why someone acts like a jerk, we haven't exhausted the possibilities or even come close to doing so. Things like that may have one cause, but there's no reason to believe that any more than that there's a single reason why the Jews and Arabs can't stop fighting long enough to raise a single season's crops.

Some things, some activities, and nearly every human one, can't be reduced to single cause, and yet we constantly seek the answer and hope to be the first to mention it on one of the Sunday morning talk shows. I have no idea what incites some people or what causes them to act the way they do, but one thing I'm certain is that they rarely even consider why the act the way they do, either.

It's better to speak, act, and write in a way that makes you look awesome than it ever is to wonder why you want to impress everyone anyway.