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Another overdue missive!

I've seen a particular sentence proliferate on social media like popcorn in the past two months. A few intermittent posts preceded a cacophony (sadly, no butter or salt). People shared a snippet of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

The implication: 2020 delivered only questions, heartbreaking some days and anxious most every other. Therefore, we are due. Owed, even. Twenty-21 must provide answers, as if years adhere to some kind of predetermined call and response. I understand that desire for assurance, but the hope constructed with that quote builds upon an inaccurate premise.

Answers are not objectively better than questions.

Just as moments have no definitive length of time, neither questions nor answers contain any inherent value.

As a journalist, I recognize that a healthy life requires both. Yet I favor questions because they open new paths. Answers often close, and they also tend to comfort, sometimes falsely.

I have read and read again the statement about the insurrection from the Folger Shakespeare Library (a block from the Capitol).

"Part of our role in civic life is to take deep questions and deep disagreements and meet them with a knowledge of history and a passion for greater understanding."

I might use that as a mission statement for this newsletter. The sentiment applies in journalism as well, articulated with succinct force by Marty Baron, who retired yesterday as executive editor of The Washington Post.

"We start with more questions than answers, inclined more to curiosity and inquiry than to certitude," he wrote to the staff. "We always have more to learn. We must listen generously to all."

For today, I'm listening to the first rain of meteorological spring, and I encourage you to embrace the questions 2021 might deliver.

“In this season of shifting, of barrier-breaking / undoing, unearthing, uprising, leveling / you, beloved, may think yourself too small. / But what a world you are!"