Dear LPG, 

There are many questions that need answering in this world and as I have journeyed through life I think that I have found the answers to quite a few of them.  Some of them are small personal ones where each of us need to find our own answers while there are also the big ones that we leave the international politicians to answer for us.  

As we get older I think logic dictates that after having found so many answers, there should be fewer that bother us but I think that as I have got to a stage in my life where I have more time to think, there seem to be more questions than ever floating around my mind.  

They say that you can find the answer to any question on the internet and I have often heard that the ultimate question that you can ask anyone consists of just one word . ‘Why’?  

If someone asks you for an answer what would you say?  The first thing I would have to do is qualify it with whatever is uppermost in my mind.    I suppose, if someone asked me that question right now I would ask for clarification but, if none was forth coming and I was going to answer, I would give an answer about why I am writing all this down.  

But then again, I don’t really know the answer to that question either.

I decided to test the ‘Google theory’, and so I have just put the word in question into the Google search bar on my computer, only to find one website which did come up with something. 

I learned that one of the history’s great thinkers, Aristotle invented a subtitle for the question ‘Why’.  He referred to it as the ‘Telos’ and accepted that it should be used as an answer to explained the purpose for each entity in the world.   This must have left his contemporary 2nd century Greeks with many answers but think how many more there are with so many 21st century gadgets coming and going all the time. 

Another explanation is that the question, ‘Why’, is sometimes called the MacGuffin.  This is a term invented by Alfred Hitchcock when he was talking about the plot of one of his films.    Apparently, in the movie industry the answer to this question has become the short version for the reason for the plot of a film.  So it will be the reason that the characters need to do what they have to do to make the story worth telling in the first place.

My logic tells me that, if this is the case, the answer to this question really has to be an explanation of what it is that drives each one of us as we have travelled through the drama that is our own individual life.  perhaps I am an indecisive person but I have to admit that I don’t really know the answer to that question if I am honest… 

Having thought about it a little more I have decided that the ultimate question, ‘Why’, requires an ultimate answer and perhaps that also consists of just one word, ‘because…’, although I don’t think the uttering of either the question or that answer will leave anyone with any greater understanding of either. 

You can tell that I had nothing better to think about when I started to write this but, having written my thoughts down, I thought them worth sharing because I suspect that there are a few others who have pondered on this question from time to time, and I would be interested to know from anyone else who might have come up with a different answer …  

Why?  because… 

SN, Croydon.

SN shares what she found… 

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