TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 17 – Defining Question
Hi, it’s Megan. This is today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy, where, as I am preparing for the retreat at the end of September in Dunfanaghy, I am journaling my thoughts as I’m preparing. This is kind of what I do whenever I am preparing for any kind of course or workshop or anything that I’m running.
At some point, I kind of prepare in a structured way, but initially I just try to immerse myself in the ideas and the work, and just try to sit in it and live in it for a few weeks. And so I’m sending myself voice notes, and I’m sharing them with you. And if you’re interested in joining us at the retreat, there are two places left now, so there’s still a couple of spots.
So today I’m thinking about one of the actually kind of bedrock concepts in my work, and something that we pay a lot of attention to at the retreat, which is your defining question.
So my little half-baked theory — although I do truly believe this — is that all of us have a body of work, whether we have been intentionally, consciously creating it or not, whether we regard ourselves as artists or not. We have a body of work. Humans are inherently creative beings. So from our earliest age, we have been amassing this body of work, you know, through little projects that we’re interested in as kids.
Like, I look at some of the stuff that my daughter brings home from school, and I can see her body of work is emerging and evolving. She’s really into making, and she’ll get obsessed with one particular thing, whether it’s one particular form, or a particular kind of thing that she wants to make again and again and again. And she’s exploring ideas through this stuff that she’s making.
So whatever little hobbies or obsessions we had as kids, those are very early indicators about what our real work is, I think. And sometimes actually those signals are very clear in the things that we were interested in as a child. So we begin building this body of work, and then we go through our lives and we continue to build a body of work. And sometimes that isn’t through our paid work — sometimes our job is not our real work.
But one way or another, we’re building a body of work, whether we’re making things, whether we are fostering community, whether we are tending to plants, tending to a garden. Like, our work can take all kinds of different forms. Maybe we’re curating events for friends. Quite often we are doing our real work in the world and we don’t recognize it, because we don’t call it work, and no one else calls it work, and it looks like this kind of informal thing, or it kind of looks like just living your life. But we can’t not do our work in some way. So we’re all building a body of work.
And my theory is that the thing that underpins your body of work is your defining question. So all of the different things that you might do — whether it’s something you do for work, and it feels like your real work, it’s like, oh yeah, I put a piece of myself in that, that’s my real work — or whether it’s a hobby you have, or an interest you have, the thing that connects all of the things that are really alive for us, that we have real curiosity about, is our defining question.
And so our defining question is, basically, by definition, it’s an unanswerable question. It’s a question that has been seeded in us from our family, from our culture, in some way. Usually it’s this unconscious question that we have about the world that is formed in our early years. And then we go through our life essentially trying to explore that question from lots of different angles.
So I’ll give you an example. My defining question is: where’s the hidden story, or where’s the hidden truth? It’s kind of in that realm. So I’m exploring that question whether I am doing story work with a client — that’s really obvious, right, I’m asking the question, what really is the story here, I’m kind of trying to dig beneath the surface to get to the truth of their story, like, what’s the part of the story that’s not necessarily obvious.
But equally, if I am watching a documentary — I’m a big documentary fan — I’m also trying to answer the question, like, where’s the hidden truth, where’s the hidden story? I’m always looking for what is the story that’s not immediately apparent.
And then equally, when I was a child and I was obsessed with black holes, and I was reading books about space, I’m also asking, where’s the hidden truth, where’s the hidden story? Or when I was studying geology, my motivation for studying geology, the thing that I find interesting about it was, oh, there’s all of this stuff under our feet, right, there are all of these rocks under the ground. We can see the unseeable through geology, like, we can map the land, we can figure out, what’s the story of how this came to be, we can figure out what’s going on over there that we can’t actually see, like, we can figure that out.
And then I got interested in psychology and stuff like that, because I wanted to see, like, what’s the hidden story with people, what are people’s motivations, what’s really going on with people. So all of these things that look like they’re superficially unrelated are all exactly the same thing.
And so I quite often work with people who might come, and they feel like their work has been all over the map, or they feel like they don’t have a consistent, congruent body of work. But actually it’s extremely congruent. It’s just congruent at a deeper level, where you’re asking the same question in a variety of different ways through all these different things that you’re interested in.
And so the thing that I think is interesting, and helpful, about a defining question — for me, anyway — is it just acts as this anchor. It helps me filter things that I will be interested in for the long term, and things that I will very quickly get bored of. I know that if a project, or some kind of piece of work, or some kind of activity, is going to let me explore the “where’s the hidden truth” question, I’ll be good with that, I will not tire of it. But if it’s something that seems kind of interesting for now, but actually there’s no way for me to explore my defining question, I’m probably going to tire of that very quickly, and it will start to feel laborious.
So it seems like a kind of insignificant thing to figure out, on some level, but when I figured out what my defining question was, and I could see, oh, this is the thread that unites all of the different things in my work and all of the different things in my hobbies and interests, I just find it extremely grounding.
And so, if you want to think about this — sometimes whenever I talk about defining question, like, the first thing that comes up for people is often, sometimes people go straight to the core, and they’ll come up with a question like, oh, well, the question that I’m always asking, and have always been asking since I was a child, is like, am I good enough, or am I lovable, or, you know, deep core questions like that. And I would say that those questions are maybe more closely related to a primary struggle, rather than a defining question — primary struggles, conversation for another day — but those are questions that are about us as a person. The defining question is about your work, it’s the question at the heart of your work.
And so a good way to think about it is, like, what is a question that you have about the world around you? It’s kind of one of the only times that I encourage people to look at the external world, and think, like, well, what are the questions that you have about the world around you. Or think about what are some pieces of work that you’ve done that have been really meaningful to you, and ask yourself, like, why were you interested in that, what were you trying to explore.
Or you can think about even, like, the kind of books or movies that you like — like, what is it that you’re looking for, what questions are you trying to explore with the kind of books and movies that you like, or hobbies that you have. So it’s not about what’s the hobby, it’s about what is my motivation for engaging in that activity, like, what question am I somehow trying to explore through that hobby, and what question about the world am I trying to explore.
Because it’s obviously also very helpful to be aware of those deeper, more personal questions, of insecurity and all of that kind of stuff. But there’s something about — if we can understand the questions we ask about the world, we can discover questions that we have about ourselves that we wouldn’t be able to directly inquire into.
So, where’s the hidden story — pardon me — where’s the hidden story, where’s the hidden truth, that’s totally a question I have about myself. But there’s no way I would have been able to directly identify that. It’s only been through identifying that, oh, that’s what’s at the heart of my work, that that question about myself has begun to reveal itself.
So I think that that is a really interesting thing — that our work can reveal things about ourselves that we wouldn’t necessarily directly reveal to ourselves. Like, we know so much that we don’t allow ourselves to know, and our bodies hold so much that — what am I trying to say — like, so our bodies hold a lot of knowledge, but our bodies are also kind of like, you can’t handle the truth. And so our body will reveal the truth to us in layers and in waves, when it can sense that we are safe, or we have the time and space to unpack whatever piece of knowledge it’s about to reveal.
And so I think our work kind of does the same thing.
So, yeah, we’ll talk about this a lot in Dunfanaghy, we’ll come back again and again — the defining question is something that’s always on my mind, and always in the picture, whenever I’m trying to help someone understand themselves and their work and the direction they’re going and all of that stuff.
So thank you for listening. I’ll see you tomorrow.