‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer.’
Zora Neale Hurston
I wish I could claim Zora’s line as my own. It’s astonishingly profound, isn’t it? I think I was edging towards the meaning, when I wrote my own lines almost exactly a year ago:
But even if I was, it’s not in the same poetic realm. Still, I think you understand. There are seasons to life that have nothing to do with the axis of the earth and everything to do with our own personal axis, how acutely we are tilting, if we can stay upright. And if not, how hard will we fall and how quickly will we stand again.
Once upon a time I would have presumed all this was arbitrary. A linear order. The year 2000 for example, which I assumed would be the big-know-it-all year of my life. A year in which everything would be solved and sorted. I don’t know why I thought this, except that I was a teenager and the year 2000 had by far the sexiest vibe of any other year. People wrote songs about it. Prince. Pulp. Remember?
Let’s all meet up in the year 2000, won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown.
But I was looking at the future from the wrong end of a telescope, which made it so small I could compartmentalize it. I would be thirty-three for heavens sake! Definitely fully gown and definitely married and definitely a parent.
There was nothing more to those thoughts. They were just assumptions. Expectations of another staging post passed. Like puberty. Or the first grey hair. That’s how deep social conditioning runs. .
2000 came and went, and although it was the year I set off to travel the world, it offered no answers. I had changed my horizon, not myself and I came home eighteen months later, with the same question that had simmered all through my twenties, now at boiling point in my early thirties: What am I going to do with my life?
The pot wasn’t taken off the boil until a decade later. 2010, when I sat down to the first poetry lecture, of the first week, of a three year degree in English Literature & Creative Writing, and I knew there was nowhere else I was supposed to be. That was a year that answered.
The years since have seen me write millions of words and six books, approach numerous agents to represent my writing and receive in reply, countless – and I mean countless - rejections.
The years since have been relentless, one after the other asking the same question over and again, until it became a roar in my ears, a shadow that never left: Will I succeed?
‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer.’
When I sat down to write this post, I knew I was going to start with this quote and I assumed it was going to lead me into writing about my divorce. Because there’s no doubt about it, 2023 has given me answers a-plenty.
Does my husband love me? No.
Is my marriage over? Yes.
Am I now, as a fifty-six year old woman, looking at a future alone? Yes.
Oh, 2023 has been chock-a-bloc full of answers. A right little know-it-all. Following me around, on repeat, because I’m stupid, and I’ve been slow at learning.
Does my husband love me? No. No-one who loves me, would treat me the way he has.
Is my marriage over? Yes.
Am I now, as a fifty-six year old woman, looking at a future alone? Yes. And better, far better to be free, than to go forward with the albatross of a marriage that isn’t working around your neck.
What I didn’t realise until I sat down to write this, is that the loudest question of all, the question that has haunted me for so long, has also been answered.
Will I succeed? Here’s a screenshot.
That’s my soundbook at No.2 in a major US library system. I’m between The Hunger Games and Harry Potter! Full disclosure here – my book was free (so I won’t be buying a private jet any time soon), as part of a bonus borrow month, but there are a quarter of a million titles in this library catalogue. Free or not, for a self-published author, with a packet of chocolate biscuits, in place of Penquin Random House’s Publicity & Marketing Department, I did exceptionally well.
2023 answered.
So yes, there are years that ask questions and years that answer them, and I believe that as we break free of the long long grass of children, and husbands, and duties, the years ahead open up a new season – one of possibility and answers for all the questions simmering away on our back-burners.
Zora’s line is from her novel, Their eyes were watching God, a truly truly magnificent book.
Although, within her lifetime, Zora achieved success, she later worked as a cleaner, died poor and was buried in an unmarked grave. That’s what all her biographies say. A footnote to her life that rings with a disapproving tone, as if dying poor and working as a cleaner are failures and disappointments. What should she have been doing? Attending self-indulgent award ceremonies? Patting herself on the back, whilst living in a penthouse, flush on royalties, bored witless? I hate this footnote. It shouts, Potential unfulfilled! Questions unanswered!
And I find it hard to believe that anyone who said so much, with so little, failed to fulfill their potential. She probably knew. As she worked her way through her cleaning routine, I’m sure she understood she was in the years of questions, and not the years of answers. And that’s just the way it is. Life is not linear.
So as 2023 draws to a close, I suppose what I’m saying is stay open and stay patient, to give the questions space in which they can be asked, and the answers quiet in which they can be heard.
Oh and give up expecting every year to deliver. No one likes a know-it-all anyway.
That’s it for a while. I need a holiday. Five Minute Reads will be taking a two- week break.
I want to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has read along this year, and especially to those who have reached out to offer advice and sympathy and encouragement. Every word has been appreciated.
You’re truly an inspiration Cary. Have a blessed two week break and keep on believing in yourself- you are exactly where you are meant to be
Well said. From another soon-to-be 56 year old just crawling out of that long, long grass, I wish you congratulations on your successes and a happy break.