The Question That Never Leaves
I ask it every single day.
It never changes. It never stops. It just is.
Why am I here? What is the reason for all of this?
I’m a man in South Dakota. The land stretches out in every direction like it’s trying to show me something I keep missing. Big sky. Long silences. Wind that moves through the grass in waves that look like thoughts. Out here the question doesn’t need to raise its voice. It just walks beside me while I do the ordinary things.
I have a fierce love for a plant called cannabis. Not the loud kind that drowns everything. The quiet kind that makes the ordinary feel holy again. Sometimes we sit together when the day is done. The plant doesn’t hand me peace. It hands me honesty. It pulls back the curtain just enough for me to see how much of my life has been spent arguing with ghosts.
But even with the plant, even in the clearest moments, the mind refuses to go quiet.
When darkness falls it brings different waves. Older thoughts. Stranger currents. Things I thought I’d buried rise up wearing new faces. When the light returns the questions multiply. They catch on every object in the room. They ride the steam from my coffee. They sit in the passenger seat on every drive across these empty highways.
Think is all we do.
We think while we work. We think while we eat. We think while we lie in bed pretending we’re resting. And the whole time we assume there is someone solid behind it all. A driver. A captain. A man in the control room who is making the decisions and living the life.
But the man that operates this mind is not here in the way we think.
I’ve touched it. Not as an idea. As a felt sense. In the gaps between the thoughts. In the seconds after the plant has thinned the usual noise. There is still awareness. There is still watching. But the one who usually claims to be “me” — the one who worries, plans, defends, and searches for reasons — he isn’t sitting in the chair I always pictured.
Who is the I that is me?
I used to believe the answer lived somewhere else. In a better job. In a deeper relationship. In God. In the next distraction strong enough to finally shut the question up. But the question doesn’t shut up. It waits. It waits in the middle of a conversation. It waits while I’m driving past fields that go on forever. It waits in the dark when everything outside is still and nothing inside is.
Lately I’ve started to notice something else.
The question itself might be the doorway. Not because it will ever be answered with words, but because every time I really let myself feel it, something in me stops pretending it knows who is asking.
Maybe the man in the control room was never there. Maybe what’s actually here is something that was never born and doesn’t need a reason to exist. Something that watches the whole show — the prairie, the ceaseless thinking, the fierce love for the plant, the dark waves, the morning questions — and simply is.
I don’t know if that’s true.
I only know that tonight, like every night, the question will still be here when the lights go out.
And I will sit with it again.
And ask.