The least but always first question

It’s the perfect question to answer with no further questions needed.  It is the one that needs no defense nor can it be argued or dismissed. Full proof or fool proof?  It is totally of our own making which makes it solely lacking (or soul lacking?).  A sole question from the one asking the question that has no answer.  What could this question be?  It’s only three letters followed by the sentence that your circumstance created and now needs an explanation.  It is “Why?”

“Ohhhh, I love it.  Now we can happily ramble on with countless and unsubstantiated statements that support and attempt to answer our “Why” question.  There is no defense for our “Why” answers if asked “Why” by others because we’ve provided all the information that they need to piece our “Why” explanation together.  It was because of “this or that” (fill in the blanks) that completes our sunny yet sordid explanation.

And the strange part is that we accept our explanations with no further thought or reflection.  If we have good and hearty friends then they will see through our shallow “Why” and probe a little deeper until they hit a dead end because we are so convinced of our “Why” explanation.  We blind ourselves to our “Why” and seem surprised that good folks surrounding us just don’t seem to buy it.

A good news reporter will ask the five questions that we all know.  Guess where “why” is?  That’s right.  Number 5.  The least answerable.  “Law and Order” lasted this long on television because the “Who” is always first with the “Why” unraveling in the last two minutes.

But in our personal lives it is usually the “Why”  that comes first and conveniently stays there because we find it so difficult to answer the first “W,” “Who.”  “Who are you?”  Occupation is the first response followed by who your parents are until you’re out of breath and out of filler words.  The bottom lines finally bottoms out and you’re let with the simplest and most complicated question someone could ever ask you, “Who are you?”

A common path is to identify ourselves in relation to others.  We respond to the question thinking of how others perceive or how we think they perceive us.  Tricky stuff because both observations may be entirely wrong.

“Who are you? In one sentence.”

The “Why” can never be unfolded and understood until the “Who” is revealed.