Getting answers

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I think all of us want answers; I know I certainly do. Yet often the answer that is given is not exactly the information I was after. This may result in asking the proverbial 100 questions.
Not that there is anything wrong with asking questions ~ in a sense it is far better to ask those 100 questions than to never figure out the answer.

So perhaps even more important than getting the answers is to ask the right questions. What is it you really want the answer to? And often it pays to spend time figuring out what our question really is before we ask. Doing that ensures that the answer we are given will hold the information we were after in the first place.

In this day and age there are many possible ways to ask our questions, and to get our answers.
We can ask friends, family, mentors, teachers, coaches... Or we can enter the ‘world wide web’, stating our question in the search engine of our choice ~ receiving often tens of thousands of possible answers within milliseconds.
When we ask our questions in meditation, it may take a little longer to get the answers ~ partly dependent on how well versed we are in the meditative process; partly because it is easy to doubt the answers we get that way (Did I really get that right?); and partly because when we ask our questions in meditation, the answers may come to us in many different ways. Sometimes we get the answer right away in that very meditation. Other times the answer can come to us in a dream... Very often, once the question is stated in a meditation, life will give us the answer.

That sounds really cool! Yet what it means is that we are getting the answers we are seeking continuously as we are living our lives. Through casual conversation. Through something we read in the paper. Through a bird ~ or any animal really ~ that attracts our attention...
They are all answers to our questions; the difficult part is to figure out which of our questions is being answered; followed by realizing what the answer is, and believing that this really is the answer we were seeking.

Getting the answers is not as much about asking the succinct question as it is about the acceptance if the information we are given and the realization of all of its implications. It is often more about the process and truly ‘getting it’, than it is about any one answer we receive...
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