Giving The Answer To Any Question
My grandfather used to tell me, “there exists a store that doesn’t only sell groceries, but also provides you an answer to any question. ” In a secluded street next to the crossroad, there exists such a store and it’s opened by my grandfather. Just by writing down your problem on a paper and sliding it into the shutter doorway of the store, you will be able to find your answer in a milk crate inside the store on the very next day. As a child, I would always see my grandfather reading and writing letters every night. I remembered that one night he asked me, “If a child doesn’t like their parents and wants to run away from home, what will you recommend him to do?” I knew immediately that he was thinking of a solution for this child’s problem, but I never answered his question and he never told me how he answered the question. I questioned if providing “answers” for people is the right thing to do since there isn’t a way to test the validity of the answers provided. As my grandfather picked me up from school one day, I took one of his letters and read it.
The letter was written by a high school student who does not know if he should follow his parent’s path in becoming a doctor or to pursue his interest in the artistic field. Without my grandfather’s permission, I wrote back to him, telling him that he should follow the path that he envisioned himself in and to believe in himself. Just a few days later, I moved away from my grandfather to live with my parents. It was not until recently that I traveled back to visit my grandfather. His store was still open, but he no longer offers people answers to their problems, instead, he receives answers from those he had previously helped. Upon my arrival, my grandfather prepared a very special gift for me, it was letters from a local art teacher who happens to be the high school student that I had written back to. In each letter he gave me his greetings and thanked me for helping him reinforce his decision to follow his own ambitions.
After reading all his letters, I realized that those people who had written to my grandfather often already have an answer to their problems. The act of asking about their problem is just to ensure that their answer is correct. If those people do not wish to live a serious life and work hard for what they wanted to pursue, it wouldn’t matter what kind of answers are provided to them; those answers would all be useless. Through the letters that were written back to my grandfather, he was able to obtain the answer to whether or not his advices really changed the lives of those people. He told me, “Those who wrote their problems to me are often clear about what they’re asking about. In other words, the letter is like their own map and those people with a problem just have no idea where they are in that map. ” It took me a very long time to understand what that meant.
People who ask questions had already created their own map and marked the path that they wanted to take, but they are just lost in that path and what my grandfather does is helping them clear up that path. I had also left my grandfather a letter under the shuttle doorway, it was an empty letter. He asked me if it was because I don’t have a question. I told him no. If the letter is a map, then I will like my letter to be empty so I can freely draw my own map. I want my future to be unbounded. After all, the answers my grandfather provides only reinforces a determined heart.
