I do my thinking on foot. There is a stretch of road near my house in Indiana where the corn gets tall enough by August that you cannot see past it, and I walk it most mornings with a song stuck in my head. Somewhere on that road, a few years back, a question came up in me that I did not want.
I will not tell you what it was. It does not matter. What matters is what I did with it, which was nothing. I set it down and kept walking. Not because I had an answer. Because asking it felt like betraying people I love.
Here is what I have learned about that feeling. It is not a character flaw. It is a survival response.
Psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski developed something called terror management theory. The short version: human beings know we are fragile, and we know the world we have built can be taken from us. When that awareness gets stirred up, by a death, a lost job, or a country that suddenly feels unrecognizable, we do not reason our way back to calm. We reach for whatever makes us feel permanent. Our worldview. Our group. Our certainty.
That is not weakness. That is a nervous system doing its job. But it has a cost. When certainty is the thing holding you up, a question feels like somebody kicking out a support beam.
In Reversing the Drift, I write about a man I call John. Fifth-generation Kentucky farmer. He worked as hard as his father and his grandfather did, and he still watched forces he could not see or name come for the land. He felt invisible. Then a voice on a stage said, in so many words, I see you. And something in him unclenched.
You can guess what happened next. Every question about that voice landed like a threat, because it was one. Not a threat to his politics. A threat to the only hand that had reached for him.
I spent a lot of years as a counselor sitting with people in exactly that spot. What I noticed, over and over, is that the question never actually leaves. It waits. It comes back at three in the morning, or in the middle of a sermon, or when a grandchild asks something innocent at the kitchen table. The mind is patient that way.
And here is the part I want you to hear. Asking the question now does not mean you were a fool for not asking it sooner. It means the fear has loosened enough for you to breathe. That is not betrayal. That is your own honesty catching up with you.
You also do not have to ask it in public. You do not have to announce anything, or apologize to anyone, or argue with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving. You can just let yourself wonder, privately, on a road where the corn is too tall to see past.
Curiosity is a quiet act of courage. It always was.
If you are somewhere in that, I wrote a whole book for you. It does not shame anybody. It walks alongside.
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