Living the Questions (And Why Not 
To Rush Your Answer)


whole and well

Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun

Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal.

#whensciencefeelslikemagic


There’s a file on my phone. It’s a file with questions. Some I scrawled in the margin of a well-worn book. Some I copied and pasted from a liturgy. Some I subscribe to be sent to me at the top of every month. Some felt downloaded, fully formed in my spirit in the cereal aisle. Most of them I have never answered, and that astonishing failure rate might be the most honest thing about me.

The other day, I went on an honest-to-whimsy playdate with a bestie. We had purchased a “book-azine"and one of those questions turned around and looked back at me. Maybe you know the feeling; you get confronted with something that juices you up.

My first instinct was answer it quickly. Solve it. Pin it. Because there’s a version of me (there’s a version of most of us) that treats an open question like a alarm. Make the noise STOP. Any answer will do.

But I’ve learned that the fast answer is only the nearest answer. It’s whatever my efficient brain can tidy up quickly. This time I decided to be patient. Wait on the answer: which looked, from the outside, like doing nothing at all. I let it sit. I let it be a marrow-question, the kind you feel in the bones.

More than a century ago, the poet Rilke told a young correspondent to be patient toward everything unresolved and to try to love the questions themselves. He’d noticed something true: a question goes to work the second you let it in. It recruits your attention. It reorganizes what you notice, the overheard sentence, the thing a friend said sideways, the page that falls open to exactly the wrong-right place. You start gathering evidence for it. And then one ordinary day, in the shower or the slow lane or the half-second before sleep, the answer arrives.

So I’m sitting with this one. Not interrogating it. Just letting it ask me what it wants to ask.

The most alive seasons of my life were spent living inside a question I couldn’t yet answer. Not the answers. The living. Becoming your true nature happens in the holding of the question.

You, with the half-started list in your Notes app, the questions you keep almost-answering. The one that turned around and looked at you. Hi, Reader.

A question you genuinely care about opens what researchers have long called an information gap the itch between what you know and what you ache to know. Your brain treats that gap as something to be closed, which is why a growthful question won’t leave you alone. It primes your attention to attend. In plain terms: the question turns your perception into a magpie, and the world starts glittering with whatever is relevant to it.

Then there’s the answer that lands all at once. The eureka. For a long time we filed that under nice feeling. The feeling, it turns out, is load-bearing. In May 2025, researchers scanned people solving visual puzzles and found that solutions reached through a true aha lit up an interconnected network: the visual cortex reshaping the very pattern it had been holding, alongside the hippocampus and amygdala, the brain’s memory-and-emotion crew (Becker, Sommer & Cabeza, 2025; PMID 40346048).

And the part that should change how you treat your own questions because those aha-tagged solutions were remembered markedly better days later. It has a name , the insight memory advantage.

Which is the science quietly blessing a refusal to rush to answer the questions that present themselves to you.


the practice
let one question linger a little longer…

  1. Choose the marrow-question. Write it where you’ll see it daily: a card by the kettle, the lock screen, the first page of the file.
  2. Refuse the first answer. When your brain shoves something at you quickly, et it marinate.First answers are nearest answers.
  3. Feed it, then leave. Take a walk. Take a nap (N2, ideally). Pray on it. Then quit gripping and let your soul compost it.
  4. Stay alert for the deposit. It might come in sideways, off-duty, when you’ve almost forget about it. When it lands with that little jolt of eureka, write it down before you forget.

A prompt, if you want one: What have I been answering too quickly? And then (this is the entire practice) don’t answer it quickly.

If anything you’ve read here has been resonant, nourishing, or of service to you in a meaningful way, please do, share this email. I appreciate your reciprocity.

In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

Here are more ways I can support you.

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p.s. Reader, the question is already changing you.

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I show you how to 
use science to get what your soul desires.

Certified behavior analyst, founding former Director of The University of South Florida’s (USF) Wellness Resource Center, Founder of GLOW Women’s Gathering with credentials in Neuroscience for Business from MIT Sloan. I’m LaShaun, I show you how to 
use science to get what your soul desires.

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use science to get what your soul desires.

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