Three Vital Questions

I want to ask you some questions. You must know by now that I like questions. I like questions more than answers. I like question marks at the end of sentences more than periods, colons, exclamation marks. I think a period, a colon, and an exclamation mark say, "We're done. This is what the statement is. This is the answer to that formula." And there's a place for that, clearly, in parts of our lives, and clearly in parts of your work. But questions ask us to open our curiosity. And what better way to live our lives, and to live our professional lives as well, than with curiosity — to be asking and asking, and to hope that every question leads to answers as well, especially when it's in the realm of our humanity.

So here are three questions — not that I coined, but three questions created, asked, by a man by the name of Hillel about 2,100 years ago. He presumably asked them because of the demands of his life and the realities of his world then. I think context mattered, but I think that context matters now as well, and all of us will see these questions and hear them in the context of what we're doing and what we're experiencing. And here they are: "If I'm not for myself, who is for me?" And the question, "If I'm only for myself, what am I?" And the third, "If not now, when?" I think they're worthy of pondering.

"If I'm not for myself, who is for me?" You remember the instruction when you get on an airplane, and they say, when the oxygen mask comes down, put it on yourself first — be helped before helping people next to you. It's always counterintuitive, I think. Our humanity, our compassion says, "Take care of them, and then me last." And yet here's that message of self-care that says, if I am not for myself, who is for me? First take care of me, then I can take care of all the other responsibilities of my life. And I think what happens to you and me, in our work lives and in our private lives, is that sometimes we don't do enough of that — looking at ourselves and saying, "I matter, and I matter enough to be dealt with and taken care of, and loved, and supported, and nurtured, and even praised" — by others and by myself.

The second part of it, that also relates to our health, mental and physical, is: if I'm only for myself, what am I? Well, we know people who live their lives, professional and personal, that way — only for themselves — and eventually what we realize is they end up alone, they end up isolated. You're a group of people, a community of people, who realizes the value of one another, of nurturing one another, strengthening one another, of recognizing and rewarding one another. If I'm only for myself, what am I — as an organization, as a leader? As a leader of a team of people, it's vital that we look at the people around us and realize their leadership, their importance, their value, the work that they brought to bear on whatever our projects are and our goals are of a given day.

So I think it's critical that we think about, on one side, ourselves, and on the other, those others. And let me give it to you in a way that's tangible. Imagine that you take two little pieces of paper, and you write the first question on one — "If I'm not for myself, who is for me?" — and put that in your left pocket. And in your right pocket put a little one that says, "If I'm only for myself, what am I?" And anytime you need to remind yourself of these values, these guiding questions, you can pull one out and say, "Aha, I need to realign my priorities and the choices that I'm making today, in this hour, in this moment, even in my life."

But let's not ignore the urgency of the last question: if not now, when? If not now, what are we putting off that's so important? Is it education? Is it exercise? Is it bettering our relationships? Is it making the decision to act on the decision that we know we've already made? Now is the only precious moment that we have. We've heard it so many ways: the past is the past, it doesn't exist anymore; the future is only hoped for and wished for and maybe assumed; but this is the moment, the now, that invites us to take advantage of it, to fill it like a vessel full of something precious and important. Again, there are three questions to leave you with, to ponder: If I'm not for myself, who is for me? If I'm only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?