Why do I always want answers, and a better understanding?

If you knew the answers to these questions, what would change in your life?

You appear to have a meticulous nature.

I think it’s a fine thing to have an analytical nature and to want to explore and understand other things, other people and oneself in particular. But you can’t let that devolve into gazing into your own navel, or you’ll simply get stuck there – and in the blame, shame and regret of all the “coulda, woulda, shoulda” that anyone’s life can be reduced to by an uncharitable critic. Don’t be that critic to yourself.

As humans I think there is nothing that we can’t do “better”. If you do something right now that appears to be “perfect”, you or someone like you will soon enough do it “better”. So there is no perfection; it’s an unattainable goal.

Hence the origin of the saying: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Live a good life; you cannot lead a perfect one, and trying to will make the one you have far worse than it would be if you simply lived in the moment without a care in the world or a thought for tomorrow. (I don’t think that’s an especially good life to live, either, so I’m not recommending that.)

Balance is counseled. Live in the moment when you can and enjoy those moments. But reflect on them, too, when the time seems right. That’s the balance you need to seek.

You want to map out “The Way Things Are”. That is to say, you want to make a mental model of how the world (life, people, yourself) works so that you can use that map to keep you from getting lost and making mistakes now and in the future. You’re constantly updating your map with new information, based on new experiences and new wrong turns you’ve made.

Everybody does this “mapping” thing. It’s useful, to a point. But it’s really important to understand the limitations of the map. The map is a static model of an ever-changing landscape; it’s not reality itself, just a rough and temporary approximation of reality. It’s a little like trying to draw a map of the clouds in a summer sky so you’ll always know where to stand so you won’t have the sun beating down on you. By the time you finish the map, it’s already out of date.

Rather than constantly getting frustrated by the failures of your map, it’s better just to accept that sometimes you’ll be in the shade and sometimes you’ll be in the sun. That means learning not to think of getting lost and making mistakes as “the enemy”. They’re part of life. Painful sometimes, embarrassing sometimes, but they have their own subtle beauty. The less you’re focused on always “getting it right”, the less all this stuff hurts.

There’s a line in the Swedish army training manual that says, “When the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain”. We can become much too reliant on our mental maps of reality, to the point that we fail to see what’s right in front of us because our noses are stuck in the map. When you stop being so afraid of mistakes, you’re more willing to put the map away and just walk the terrain of reality itself, allowing yourself to get lost every now and then, letting mysteries be mysteries.

@thorninmud‘s advice reminds me of a story I read about not too long ago where the exact thing happened that he discusses with the disagreement between map and terrain.

Apparently (and from what I understand this is part of a true story) some hikers in the Rocky Mountains became disoriented and lost, and found themselves in a canyon with a stream. Recognizing that there was only one stream in the vicinity, and realizing that they had started generally downstream from where they now found themselves, they could have simply followed the stream to safety. Instead, they trusted their map and their faulty sense of which direction they were headed, ignored the fact that the stream would have been running downward toward safety… and headed upstream instead to a worse fate.

The process of analyzing is a generally good thing, but it is not a good thing to get lost in that analysis and to substitute that analysis for awareness and true understanding – and just living.

I think we’re agreeing in this: Be thoughtful and analytical with moderation. But don’t forget to enjoy the experience of living, too.

Could you give an example of the kind of questions that you ask? I mean no offense but, with a site full of people who think more deeply about things than the average person, you seem to be mostly asking about how people have been treating you.

I think people need to know what is going on and how because of our inner god-complex; we want to be in control of our own destiny and situations.

@LostInParadise I don’t ask this to everyone but the direction of the conversation tends to go toward the “why” it is or why one does what they do. So it could be the reasons behind everything. Mostly concerned with humans. And then it could lead to a proposal for a solution, or alternate possibility to the action that derive from a healthier reason.