When I was asked to write about why I work with young people, it was difficult to know how to answer directly. And what did come to mind was that I had been contemplating roads and paths recently, and their ubiquity in life. It would be a rare day that I didn’t drive, walk, or see some road, path, or track. Perhaps I need to spend some days in a remote wilderness or a desert.

And then the question came, I think because I work with words: what kind of sentence would a road be, were it a sentence on a page? And because I work with words, and because I was interested, I followed this question:

Since a road has many turns and intersections where a choice is necessary, a command doesn’t seem to express its essence. And simultaneously, a road has such continued steadiness and perseverance, whether it be the road that runs flat and never bends over open ground, or a road that makes dizzying switchbacks on a mountain descent, so that an exclamation, a sudden crying out of an inner experience doesn't seem to encapsulate a road in words either.

A road might be a statement, with its clear purpose, its dedicated certainty, its line on the map. Still, even if we have the map, we can only walk one stretch at a time. It is not our daily selves that holds the whole statement of a road.

How we experience roads day by day, one part at a time, one turn at a time, could this be expressed as a question? Not literal, academic questions, which can be such dry, one-halfed husks of emptiness, but as Rilke spoke of questions, as guides we can follow with trust in the process:

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The point is to live everything. A road could be a question, and a question could be a road.

So if we can cultivate spaces where young people can gather and sound their questions of inner and outer life, in a living and healthy way, this may be a useful practice for their living the questions. Every person has something to bring to community and the questions that we follow often have much to do with what we have to bring. Community is strengthened and vitalized by people giving what they have to give, and the contributions are inevitably unique and new and necessary. And it seems healthy that we leave room for something new to enter for our communal future.

Jen Zimberg is part of the carrying group for the Y Project retreat in July 2019, Hillsdale, NY, “What’s Freedom Got to Do With It? Exploring Identity, Gender, and Sexuality.”