Living in the Question

For twenty years, a cat served as mayor of a small town in Alaska. I won't tell you which one, or how. Until I do, some part of your mind will sit with that sentence, turning it over, reaching for an explanation that fits. That reaching, more than the fact itself, is the interesting part.

Psychologists have a name for the discomfort I just created, and the relief you're hoping I'll provide: the need for cognitive closure. It's an old feature of the mind, evolved long before there was anywhere to look an answer up. What's changed is not the need. What's changed is the distance between the question and the answer, which has collapsed to the time it takes to unlock a phone.

We have, in effect, skipped the middle of thinking. Rilke told a young poet to "live in the question." Beau Lotto, opening a talk on perception, told his audience he wanted them to leave knowing less than they arrived with, because "nothing interesting begins with knowing; it begins with not-knowing." Both were describing the same discipline: staying in the gap long enough for something to happen there.

I notice this most clearly in the coaching room. A leader arrives with a problem already converted into a decision to be made — a person to promote or let go, a strategy to approve or kill. The question that actually matters, what is this decision protecting me from feeling, gets skipped, because it doesn't resolve as quickly as the operational one. Certainty is comfortable. It is also, often, premature.

There's a cost to this beyond the personal. Maria Konnikova, writing on the psychology of closure, notes that people under pressure to decide "produce fewer hypotheses and search less thoroughly for information," anchoring instead on whatever they encountered first. We mistake the first available answer for the correct one, not because it's better, but because it arrived before we were ready to keep looking.

None of this is an argument against answers. It's an argument for noticing how quickly we reach for them, and asking what we lose in the reaching. A researcher at UCSF ran an experiment on mice: given a choice between an enclosed space and an open one, mice with intact "anxiety neurons" chose the enclosure, every time, before any higher reasoning had a chance to weigh in. Suppress those neurons, and the same mice walked into the open field.

I don't think we're so different. Uncertainty reads as danger to an old part of the brain, and we move to shut it down before we've asked whether the open field might have been worth entering. The work, for me and for the leaders I sit with, is less about eliminating that reflex and more about noticing it in time to choose. Not every question needs an answer today. Some of them are better lived in for a while.