It’s definitely a question I find myself asking quite frequently. In all honesty it could just be some weirdly obsessive Pavlovian remnant from my school days, but regardless of the cause I think it has helped me a great deal up to the present moment. I’ve even turned it into a sort of game! Asking it too excessively leads to obsession, and not asking it enough leads to blindness. This slackline-esque balancing act is perpetual movement toward destination sublime, and all the game requires is taking one step after the other.

It’s so easy to fall off though! I was reminded of that this evening while I was pulling weeds with my grandma. Two months ago, I mentioned in my Masculine Order post that I wanted to see if the grass would grow after loosening up the hard clods of dirt that wouldn’t retain any water. After about a month, it was obvious that no grass was growing, so I concluded that I was wrong.

I originally thought that was the end of it, but apparently I fell off on the side of blindness. My grandma noticed that instead of grass, a ton of weeds started to grow all over the yard! A vast majority of them grew in the patches of dirt that I had worked on, so the lawn would have probably been better off if I just didn’t do anything 2 months ago. Complete fail! By not questioning my action further, I was unable to notice the perceived neutral result turning into a negative.

That’s a pretty simple example, but I encountered another situation while I was in Joshua Tree this past weekend. Robert, Edwin and I wanted to climb up a mountainous pile of boulders near Barker Dam that was easily several hundred feet tall. The exposed, sheer faces of the boulders were dangerous and difficult to climb, but we managed to traverse an easier route all the way to the top.

On the way down, we wanted to take the same route to minimize our encounter with sketchy situations.  I was especially vigilant because of my previous experience losing sight of the path climbing down these boulders just a few months ago (that part was not fun to say the least). Everything went smoothly, but there was a brief section where I fell ever so slightly on the side of blindness. I climbed down the face of a boulder and quickly realized it was the wrong path while I was still clinging to it. All I had to do was slide over to the side to get back to the right path, but it easily could have ended up way worse! I was entirely exposed high up on the face of a rock without many holds to grip onto; all because I didn’t ask the question earlier.

Aside from these two examples, this game can be played in so many different contexts that may even occur simultaneously, and the location of the sweet spot can vary tremendously depending on the severity of the consequences. I must have asked some variation of that question at least 15 times while climbing on the boulders versus once in 2 months for my grandma’s lawn. Sorry, I don’t care about her lawn that much, but then again I wonder when I would start to tip toward the side of obsession. Asking everyday? Once a week? What if I was a professor at a university, or a protester, or a parent? What would I even ask about? So many things to potentially be wrong about; it’s pretty scary!

If I were to give the sweet spot a name, I would call it humility. It often hurts learning that I am wrong about something when I don’t ask frequently enough, but it can be equally painful to ask too often and not find an answer. To play the game, all you need is a hypothesis.