Questions

Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance—after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy—you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.

Ask questions.

No.

Screech questions out loud—while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you—while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks—outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it—a demand for people to reach a finer place.
Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?

No one asks questions anymore.

Can you imagine the Nobel prize winner of 3120?
Can you imagine when they have to put spatulas on stamps because they've ran out of anything else?
Can you picture a future farther than 100 years from now?

You can't you?
There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.
People appear confident, but when you start to ask difficult questions the confidence falters and fades.

Never stop asking questions.
Never stop changing.
Never stop asking questions ever.
Question your life
Question your job
Question your friends.
Question everything.

That's my assignment for you.
Question everything.

You're going to be forever homesick, walking through a cold railway station until the end, whispering strange ideas about existence into the ears of children. Your lives will be tinged with urgency, as though rescuing buried men and lassoing drowning horses. You'll be mistaken for crazies. You may well end up foaming at the mouth in a central Canadian drug clinic, Magic-Markering ideas onto your thighs, which are bony from scouring the land on foot. Your eyes will always feel as if you've been staring at the sun, your bodies seemingly aching to cool them by staring at the moon. There aren't enough words for 'transform.' You'll invent more.

We own this planet now.
It's ours.

A thousand years ago, five hundred years ago, hell even a hundred and fifty years ago, if all the humans disappeared the world could go on. Now that's no longer possible. If we dissapear, the factories remain, the evian bottles remain, the cola cans and the skyscrapers remain. Millions of years of rust and rot accumulate.
Millions of years to eliminate all trace of humanity.
We've reached a critical point in time.
Time is now the equivalent of human history.
If humans disappeared, time disappears.
It becomes irrelevant.
We're on the brink of something here.
Some change.
The only thing that will ensure it is a good change is a forging of human will towards a central goal.

So never stop asking questions.

Find the goal.