The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on October 27th, 2025.
Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.
My Story Part 1
In February 2014, I had recently landed in Taiwan on a one-way ticket, set to explore Asia amidst my four year spiritual journey. I started by staying with a friend for a few weeks. While he worked his day job, I spent my days reading, writing, meditating, and wandering around town.
One weekday morning, I awoke naturally around 8am, but I just couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed. I felt a familiar pit of despair in my being. I ended up laying there for 16 hours, only getting out of bed when I had to pee so bad I thought my bladder might explode.
When I finally emerged, the trance of meaninglessness had lifted, but I felt a deep sobriety and sadness.
This was the longest I’d ever felt stuck in bed, but this sense of piercing meaninglessness had followed me for the prior 15 years. I had tried so many things to shake it — academia, travels, partying, romance, and now a big meditative spiritual journey.
Over those years, sometimes I was so galvanized by a particular pursuit or relationship that the apathy would disappear for a while, whether a day or a few months. There were periods of great joy. I also noted that as I began meditating more seriously, the apathetic periods were happening less and less.
But, periodically, like that morning in Taiwan, I would wake in the morning and a sense of crippling nihilism would take over. What’s the point of it all? What am I doing here? All this hustle around the globe, everyone so busy, for what? We’re just going to die anyway. I want to disappear under these covers and not have to deal with any of it.
If I had to sum it up, the unresolved question of my heart was, “why bother?”
It wasn’t an intellectual question so much as an emotional one.
I could recite many reasons why I was glad to be alive. I didn’t think of myself as a “depressed person.” More like someone who was enlivened and excited to be alive a good chunk of the time, but then would be overcome with a deep, unexplainable apathy.
In many ways, my inability to emotionally answer, “why bother?”, lit a fire in my heart that launched me on a spiritual quest.
Living The Questions
If we look closely enough, most of us have a big question, maybe even a few of them. Some examples include:
- Am I lovable?
- Where do I belong?
- What’s the purpose of life? Of my life?
- What does it all mean?
- Why is life so hard? Is there another way?
- What is the best way to be?
- Is there a God?
- What happens after death?
- What to get enlightened?
- How to really trust?
- What is truth?
- How to be here now, enduringly?
- How to discover the truth?
- How to live wisely?
- What am I, really?
- What does it mean to live fully?
Much of society just tumbles through the days, not really peering into their heart to examine the unresolved questions.
The hectic daily pace of modern life, particularly when it’s a struggle to get by, blunts our energies. With the time left, media or substances tend to distract us from our deeper instincts.
And yet, there are those of us who are spiritually hungry, who know there is something more yearning to be realized.
Even though it’s no guarantee we’ll ever answer our deepest inquiries, the thing that feels the most meaningful is to look anyway.
To this sort of person, Rainer Maria Rilke gave the following advice:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
How To Live A Question
In one great exchange, a student asked the Buddha, “how does one discover the truth?” In other words, how does one take an unresolved question, and live our way into the answer?
The Buddha recommended seeking out a wise person, interacting with them, asking questions, and putting into practice what they suggest.
Nowadays, with all the available books and media that have recorded the wisdom of many great teachers, it’s much more possible to “do it alone.” For example, if you struggle with feeling lovable, read this book and wholeheartedly do the exercises for a few months — you’ll certainly have more self-love than beforehand.
Nonetheless, the speed & likelihood of success go up exponentially when we actually interact with someone who has made it to the other side.
In turn, for a modern day example of the power of seeking out a wise being, I once heard an exchange between one of the wisest people I’m aware of, Buddhist teacher, Gil Fronsdal, and a sincere student.
The student asked something like, “what is the meaning of life?”
Gil countered, “what is the part of you that wants to know?”
Mic drop.
Gil went on to describe how in Buddhism, rather than answer big questions like this directly, we’re more interested in the underlying suffering that compels us to ask them.
Maybe the suffering takes the form of loss, mortality, struggle, oppression, sadness, despair, apathy, confusion, anger, longing, shame, or any number of other things. Maybe it’s just raw pain or the deep conviction that “it shouldn’t be like this.”
Whatever it is, in the process of looking, we often realize that the real question isn’t always the one we had in mind from the onset.
In turn, for the Buddha, the first most important question on the spiritual path is, “what’s this suffering about?”
If you have an unresolved question, there is always some suffering underneath — some sense of not being 100% totally at peace. When you can see this and turn toward it, then you can in earnest follow the Buddha’s first Noble Instruction that “this suffering is to be understood.”
The understanding he points to is not an intellectual understanding, like something a psychotherapy textbook would tell you. It’s an understanding on the level of direct felt experience.
It’s meeting the suffering with mindfulness. Being intimate with. Learning its subtler causes, its flavor, its impact. It’s about neither suppressing it nor fusing with it, and seeing what emerges in the middle ground.
Simply put, this understanding is more on the heart level than the head level.
A major step of living the question is to directly inquire into the suffering underneath the question.
My Story Part 2
Spiritual life is sort of like a ball of yarn, with many interlacing strings.
In turn, it’s not as if “why bother?” was the singular focus of my spiritual life.
I put energy into many things, like to grow more fully into love, harmony, and freedom. I wanted deep friendships and to nurture my formal meditative practice. There were likewise many different strands of suffering that emerged over the years, but one of them seemed disproportionately large — call it apathy, nihilism, an existential void, or any number of things.
In any case, in my 20’s, the more I practiced yoga and meditation, the more it felt like some veil was lifting. Even the simple fact that I could name this demon was a huge step. I was incredibly inspired to see how far the rabbit hole went.
When I was already off in Asia, at some point, I encountered a book by Burmese meditation teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and I had a strong sense this was the person I needed to go find, interact with, ask questions, and put into practice what he suggested. This led to a roughly two-year period of intensive meditation under his guidance.
During that time, I had got to the point where I could keep the apathy at bay — there were no more 16 hour days in bed. I could see the associated thoughts, emotions, impulses, and sensations, and for the most part, not get caught in them.
There was a profound freedom in this non-entanglement, along with an incredible amount of self-love. I stopped feeling like a part of me was broken and needed to be fixed. I could let myself feel what I felt. I could rest, deeply rest.
However, the apathy still continued to arise from time to time. I could maintain center when it did, but it was like doing so while bearing an extra weight, like walking around with a backpack full of rocks.
When I would share this with U Tejaniya, he would often ask, “do you know why it arises?”
I could give an intellectual answer, but on a more fundamental level, I really didn’t know why.
After I stopped being a monk, I continued to live the question, just transitioning the form.
I maintained the life-changing practices I had learned over the prior years, but I also sought out other teachers in the relational and psycho-emotional realms, exploring the mind in that way.
Something that became clear, somehow hidden to me for most of my life, was that I had a lot of fundamental shame. On a deep, internalized level, this mind held the view that “I don’t matter.”
It wasn’t exactly that “nothing matters,” but that “I don’t matter.” If we were to engage in intellectual meditative banter, you might say, “that’s a good thing — no-self, right?” Not exactly. There is a very big difference between the experiential understanding of selflessness and having a low self regard.
In any case, that belief had been programmed into me in my teen years, via the messaging that if I didn’t believe in Jesus, my life was essentially worthless and destined for hell. I mostly disassociated for my teen years, and then coming into adulthood, just felt apathetic a lot of the time. The link between my upbringing and my adult emotional baseline was never clear — until it was.
To keep with the truncated version of my life story, once I clearly saw that affliction within the mind, grounded in a steady, wise awareness on a month-long meditation retreat, there was a moment I’ll never forget, where it thoroughly dissolved, leading to one of the most joyful and profound weeps of my life.
I didn’t know at the time that the belief of “I don’t matter” was the answer to U Tejaniya’s “why does it arise?” question, but in the aftermath, as days have turned into nearly a decade, the perpetual shame, apathy, and nihilism have simply never returned.
To be clear, sometimes I still lay under the covers in the morning to soak in the coziness, sometimes I don’t feel like doing anything, and other times, I say or do something inappropriate and feel a shot of temporary shame. But these are very, very different from the deep emotional nihilism that seemed to follow me like a shadow for all those years.
In turn, the question, “why bother?” now feels completely irrelevant. I don’t need to tell myself an answer or convince myself of anything. On a deep, wordless, heart level, the answer is obvious.
Curiously, after spending much of my life hiding in the background, after that release, it wasn’t too long until I started teaching in earnest, and likewise opened myself enough to meet my wife and be in the kind of relationship that felt deeply nourishing.
But wait – what is the answer?
When I teach on Right View, I often give some textbook answer to this question, like how cause & effect are real, how suffering & well-being matter, and how your actions determine which way the universe flows. Basically, I teach people to internalize karma — the principle I playfully define as, “what you do matters.”
However, these are just words.
I think the most helpful answer that applies not just to “why bother?”, but to any true inquiry of the heart is pointed to in that exchange with Gil Fronsdal.
“What is the part of you that wants to know?” What is the suffering within that compels you to ask? Turn towards that! Make it a life’s exploration!
Of course, meditation is an incredibly helpful tool for actually doing this, as opposed to just sitting around thinking in circles.
Anyhow, as I continue my practice, it’s not like that insight that dissolved fundamental apathy has dissolved all stress, suffering and dissatisfaction. Until we are fully liberated, we’ll continue to find some sense of not-quite-right.
It’s sometimes said that the dharma is a “path of purification,” as if to say, as practice goes through years and decades, we shed layers of affliction, moving through increasingly subtler levels of suffering. If we keep engaging, new questions reveal themselves.
When I would ask my teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, why he kept practicing and how he continued to be so motivated to keep going, he would invariably say something like, “I don’t want to suffer — this is the way to do that.”
In my own practice over the past few years, I’ve been taken by the question, “what is freedom beyond contentment?” Maybe in another decade, I’ll be able to write about this question with some real depth and clarity!!
Anyhow, the key to practice is to keep looking, keep turning towards, and keep living the questions.
Conclusion
Whatever is the big question of your heart, can you put words to it?
From there, I invite you to get intimate with the part of you that wants to know.
Learn about it. Feel it. Study it. Meet it without needing to fix it, change it, or make it go away — practicing the mindful middle way between suppression and fusion.
To help expedite the process, you might follow the Buddha’s advice and seek out wise beings and dialogue with them.
As scary and icky as it may be at times, I invite you to continue to live that question, now, now again, and still now.
As Rilke says, if you keep at this, “perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
—————–
f you would like to get a monthly’ish email with reflections like this one, along with some event updates, sign up here for the newsletter.