A walking question is a question whose answer unfolds as the path is walked.
There isn’t an answer ‘out there’ to be grasped and kept in a piggybank of propositional knowledge.
We come to know the answer in becoming the answer.
The first time I came across the concept was in the video below of a workshop with Thomas Hübl on intimate relationship and awakening.
“What is the current evolutionary question that I walk with, or that walks me?” TH
A walking question brings us to the frontier.
What is the frontier?
The frontier is the edge of your conscious universe. It’s a specific and intimate thing. There are secrets on the frontier, and, in some sense, they are secrets only you could discover. And in the intimate specificity of these secrets, something about the universal is revealed.
“When we see questions as evolutionary engines, the questions usually show us an inner edge that we don’t see. An inner edge where we meet our shadow world. Or an edge where we meet our future.” TH
The further you go out on the frontier, the fewer models there are and the less helpful they become. As Coleman Barks wrote, “Footprints disappear at ocean’s edge.”
You create and become the model by living the understanding of yourself more deeply. I think the Latin word inventio is instructive here, a word that combines (or rather, doesn’t separate) discovery and invention.
There are times when I find myself frustrated - tangled in self doubt, the wanting to know, wanting clarity, wanting resolution.
"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Beautiful, Jason!