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In this post, we are focusing on how we can create guiding questions for our lives. These life questions will help us to narrow our focus to what really matters in our lives. We will develop our life purpose by looking back on past experiences to better live in the present moment. Developing these questions will help you to live better one year, five years, and ten years down the road. They will help you to love yourself more and to live well for God.
Education is the science of relations
I was recently having a conversation with my husband and at one point I asked him what would help him with his bible study. He responded quickly, “I would need my twelve questions.” This was a reference to a man he had learned about named Richard Feynman. Richard was a scientist and physicist who lived from 1918-1988. He worked on the Manhattan Project, won a Nobel Peace Prize, and later became a lecturer at Caltech. One of his practices was to have 12 questions or problems always going on in his mind. He wrote down 12 key questions that were the focus of his life. He wasn’t researching these questions constantly. Instead, they were always in the back of his mind. If he had a conversation with someone or read something that related to his question, he would write it down. By doing this, he was really amassing a great wealth of knowledge about a topic. Why? Because his mind was always keen on learning more. He never just ‘checked out’ of life, because if he did, he would have missed these opportunities.
Which brings us to Charlotte Mason. Charlotte Mason was an educator and philosopher who lived from 1842-1923, whose work has given rise to the homeschool philosophy that is named after her. One of her key principles is “Education is the science of relations.” She states, “That a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of— “Those first-born affinities “That fit our new existence to existing things.” Even though this principle is specifically talking about children and their education, this applies to us as well. We all are people who make sense of the world by relating it to what we already know. We also have the ability to make connections between topics that are pretty amazing and not always readily apparent. (- Like connecting Richard Feynam to Charlotte Mason.)
Importantly, Charlotte Mason emphasized that people need a ‘generous feast of ideas’ in their education. To be able to make relationships and connections between topics as different as handicrafts and natural lore, you need to know quite a bit about each one. You don’t need to know everything about it. But, you need to be exposed to that information. You also don’t need to necessarily have that connection spelled out. In fact, as a teacher, I know that connections and learning made by the student is infinitely better than the connections that I make for them. Learning done by the student sticks.
Charlotte was creating this feast of ideas in her schools, and many parents now use her work as a guide for how to create a feast of ideas for their children. Once you have graduated high school and maybe college, you don’t have someone spreading a generous feast for you. One of the hopes is that someone given the skills to learn in school will continue learning, and thus become a life-long learner (a buzzword in education). But, we all know that it is difficult to make time to read, listen to podcasts, and pursue learning on our own. However, we must if we want to be capable of making those connections. We need to be taking in information if we want to learn anything to relate to our life questions.
So, how do these two people and their philosophies of life relate to each other? We have the amazing ability to make connections between a wide array of ideas. We also know that we must continue learning to be able to make those connections. We talk a lot about purpose on this blog and what our purpose is. Is being a lifelong learner our true purpose? I would say no. Ecclesiastes 1:17-18 gives us this caution: “And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” If we look at these verses, we may think we shouldn’t strive to learn at all. However, Solomon goes on and says in Ecclesiastes 2:13, “Then I saw that there is more to gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness.” Wisdom is worth striving for, but it should not be our sole purpose in life. Our sole purpose is to “fear God and keep his commandments.” When all has been done that is what will matter in light of eternity.
There is so much information that exists that there would be no way to truly consume all of the knowledge out there. According to an article on Medium, there are over 155 million books that exist today, not including the self-published books that are out there. In addition to this, there are around 7.5 million blog posts published per day, and 28 million podcasts are published per year. So while wisdom is a worthwhile pursuit of our life, how can we figure out which wisdom and knowledge to pursue?
This is where our 12 life questions come in. We can use these 12 life questions to declutter and hone our focus on what really matters.
If you have a minute, watch this short video to get a better understanding of what the 12 life questions could look like in addition to their purpose
The Purpose of the 12 Life Questions
Devising your 12 problems or questions doesn’t just help to guide your learning. In the video, she described the ways that her problems helped her to realize a central truth about herself, which was her need to understand polarities that are in tension and bring them to cohesion. Your questions will help you to realize the driving forces behind your life. They may even help you to cut out the clutter in your every day so that you can focus more fully on them. I just finished Marie Kondo’s book on tidying. It was a quick read that helped give me the motivation to do an overhaul of all of the stuff in my house.
In her book, she mentions why tidying can be life-changing. When you start to go through the items that dominate your life and determine to keep only what is truly important to you, you will have to make decisions about what is important to you. You will have to determine what type of person you are going to be. She mentions that you learn how to make decisions when dealing with small items, like whether to keep or get rid of a vegetable peeler. Through 1,000 small decisions, you are building your muscles in order to make wise choices about the big things in life. Our 12 questions will not help you to declutter your house. However, they will help you to declutter the focus of your mind.
Related: Are you drowning in noise?
All the information in the world is constantly assaulting us. Just like noise pollution can affect us – which we talked about here, information overload can drown out our minds and cause our processing to come to a screeching halt. In an article by PsychCentral, the authors describe one of the downfalls of the information age: All of this information can “place heavy demands on brain function, which becomes overwhelming and confusing. The result may be what some commentators have coined as data smog or data asphyxiation.” When we try to do and learn too much, we are at risk of raised cortisol levels (the same chemical that causes the issues of fight or flight responses. This is compounded with our technology use which you can learn more about here.) We have to use our willpower and some of the strategies described in this Harvard Business Review Article to conquer information overload.
One of the recommendations that the author gives in her post is to filter through information. What better way to filter through information than comparing it to the guiding questions of our lives? We need these guiding problems for both our mental health and to make connections that are relevant and meaningful for us.
***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***
What are your 12 life questions?
So let’s start first with determining our 12 problems or questions that are a main focus in our lives. Our 12 life questions are the problems that we always keep going back to. They are the one thing that is a constant in your life. You could figure out what those problems are by looking at some of the following areas:
- The books you read
- Podcasts you listen to
- Shows you watch
- Tidbits you remember and share with your loved ones in conversation
If you journal, these might be the questions that you keep asking yourself and pondering over. You could enlist the help of a spouse, family member, or friend to see what is constantly pestering you. They probably have heard an earful of it! With the help of one person or two, you should be able to come up with a list of what is concerning you.
The important thing is that these areas are not just the specific hobbies, topics, or things you are interested in. They are the deep questions, the important questions. They are overarching problems that will be a major focus of your life. The difference between this is the difference between my saying that I am into sourdough bread making – a great and challenging activity – and saying that I am curious about which foods make for a healthier gut and a healthier life. Being into sourdough is a hobby. It is a fact. It is not a great problem that I can wrestle with over time for years to come. Being interested in how your gut affects your overall health and the ways to strengthen your gut is a rabbit hole in which my whole life can fall down. It’s so important to spend time to narrow our focus on what these questions are.
You need to discern what questions you keep coming back to. What areas drive your focus?
Here are my 12 Life Questions:
- How can I best live a God-centered life?
- How can I use my life to inspire others and spur them on to live for God?
- Who am I? What do I enjoy? What do I find interesting? What do I find beautiful?
- How can I live a more productive, efficient, and balanced life?
- What is the best way to educate myself? To educate others?
- How is technology affecting our minds, bodies, and souls? How can I control my social media use instead of letting it control me?
- What does practical theology say about money, marriage, parenting, schooling, stewardship, habits, church, work, rest, and life?
- Where have I come from? How can I pass my inherited legacy down to others?
- What is the meaning of home? How can I make my home a haven?
- Where should I go next?
- How can I bring together the disparate and make it connected?
- How can I “live deep” and “suck the marrow out of Life”? (A quote from Thoreau in Walden’s Pond that has become a central tenet of my life.)
Some lessons from developing my life questions
It takes time to change. You won’t just know exactly what makes you tick the first time you sit down to write your questions. There are no wrong answers, but at first, the questions may not seem right to you. It takes time and effort to reflect and truly know yourself. As I sat down to do some reflection and brainstorm my questions, I knew automatically that my primary goal was living a God-centered life. But after writing down that I wanted to live for God and inspire others to do the same, I was at a loss. That confusion actually helped me to realize one of my other questions is simply, “Who am I? What do I enjoy? What do I truly find beautiful?” I tend to go along with other’s hopes and dreams and forget who I am in the process. At the same time, I’m a sucker for the latest personality test or description (I could teach a whole course on the enneagram). The struggle to find the perfect wording to describe the problem you’ve been chasing is one of the beautiful parts of writing down your life questions. It is a moment of self-discovery that leads to self-actualization. These life lessons come from doing the work of personal growth. Of staring provoking questions in the face and wrestling with them now.
I was recently listening to a podcast with New York Times Bestselling author, Jon Acuff, on goal setting and achieving your goals. One of his recommendations for figuring out what your goals should be is to consider what your top favorite moments were. If you know what has given you joy in the past, then you can use that as a guide to figure out how to include more of that in your life.
Guiding our journey
Looking through my life questions, I can see how each question has guided my degree choice, career, bible study topics, podcasts, and the books I listen to. I can also see how I’ve been consistently narrowing my focus on energy to these questions. When you are just starting out, it’s hard to know where your focus should be because the whole world is open to you. Slowly, you start to weed out what is truly important and just focus on the essentials (if you are interested in more on this process, read this book, Essentialism).
I’ve been constantly looking for ways to get better at teaching, communicating, and knowing how to teach and communicate about what really matters, the Bible. After getting my degree in English and then teaching for 5 years. I transitioned my focus when I decided to stay home. Even this blog is an extension of the questions that you read above.
***Knowing what drives you helps you to know where you should head.***
Years ago I was getting ready to start my study abroad experience (during which I had a lot of feelings – you can read about it in my Wilderness Wanderings Series). Before leaving, I remember sitting at my college desk with my laptop in front of me and my Europe guidebook beside me. It hit me that I was truly creating a life that I loved. The life that I had dreamed of when I was graduating high school – far-off places with just a backpack in my hand chasing the sun – I was about to go and realize it. Developing your life questions can help you to create a life that you love because it shows you what you desire, and what is important to you.
That doesn’t mean that everything will fall into place once you have created this. Though I lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world when I was in Vienna, I also dealt with crippling loneliness and homesickness. Marie Kondo describes how when possessions – especially books – come into our lives they are there for a specific purpose at that point in time. We don’t need to feel sorrow and pain for the ideal that we didn’t measure up to. We have passed through that season with exactly what we needed to get out of it. And it’s not a done deal – we are still growing. So we can move forward into the future without a ton of regret for what didn’t happen in the past.
If you find that you feel guilty over not knowing what your questions should be or over what you found has been your focus, just know this is a perfect time to reset and refocus. It’s never too late to edit the things guiding your life.
Once you have created your life questions, you can confidently step forward into the future, putting one foot in front of the other as you chip away at your goal. These questions will give you the focus you need to get there.
Enjoy the journey.
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