Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack | Question by The Moody Blues

In the final episode of Season Two, I discuss Question by The Moody Blues—the first full album I ever listened to as a child, and perhaps the earliest musical seed of what would eventually become Ethical Adulthood.

At seven years old, I wanted answers. I asked my father what this song meant, and he tried his best to explain. More than fifty years later, I’m still sitting with the same questions.

Why do we seek certainty?
 Why is truth so hard to swallow?
 What happens when grief shatters the stories we tell ourselves about love, safety, and meaning?

This episode explores the central paradox of ethical adulthood: learning to live inside uncertainty without collapsing into despair. Because perhaps maturity is not about finding the right answers at all.

Perhaps it is about learning to live inside a question mark instead of an answer key.

Season Two ends not with certainty, but with something more honest:

A question of balance.

Andrea Fiondo
Ethical Adulthood
Kundalini Yoga in Detroit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Welcome back to Ethical Adulthood of Detroit Soundtrack. Today's episode, I think, is the final episode of season two, which I dedicated to the music that has shaped my thinking around ethical adulthood. In a world that frequently rewards unethical behavior, it seemed important to me to point out that so many truths about living can be found in our everyday lives. If we'll only spend the time to look carefully, be thoughtful, and recognize that we are responsible for ourselves and the ways our behavior affects other people. This record, a question of balance, was in my ears as early as 1970 when I was barely seven years old. This is not a children's record. This isn't even a teenager's record. This is an adult record. Even the album cover is scary. But this record got under my skin. I played it start to finish over and over again. But it's the first song on the album question that was the one I asked my dad about. What does this song mean? He said, play the song. They used to put the words on the inside of the album in those days. I remember him reading the words on the album as it played. And when the song was over, he closed the album cover and he looked at me and he said, Well, it's sort of a love song. He's lost his love and he's pretty torn up about it. And he has questions about the way things are in the world because he's grieving. And he's not too happy that he can't find the answers to his questions. Or something like that, is what I remember. I crinkled my forehead as I tried to figure out what it was he was trying to tell me, and I narrowed my eyes at him. And I said, What door do you knock on to ask the questions? And I said, What is hate and death and war? And I said, What is the war of love? And he said, Oh my gosh, Andrea, let's just let this one go. You see, kids think answers exist. And fathers want to give answers because they want that child to know that most questions can be answered. It's not for a long, long time that the child with all those questions grows up to see that the questions themselves may be the point of life rather than obtaining the right answers. This song begins and ends with the same refrain. Why do we never get any answers? And here's me at seven asking, what is he even asking about, Dad? What questions? What answers? Of all the songs I've covered this season, this one may be the hardest to simply enjoy. This is not a comfortable song. The guitar opens and it is in a hurry. It's furious and anxious, and it's running at breakneck speed, and the blasting, heralding horns follow right on its heels. Then the vocals begin, and they are not pretty. And it starts with a question: Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war? Then comes the line that unlocks the whole song for me. Because the truth is hard to swallow. Wait, that's the answer. That's the answer to the opening question. Why do we never get an answer? Because the truth is hard to swallow. We say we want answers. But what we usually want is comfort. We want reassurance. We want certainty. We want a promise that life will make sense and that loss will spare us. But truth offers no such bargain. Truth says there are no guarantees. Truth says grief will come. Truth says love does not exempt us from loss. Truth says life is beautiful and finite and often unfair. No wonder we keep knocking. No wonder we keep searching for a better answer. Reality may have answered us all along. We just don't like what it said. Then the song shifts. And suddenly three truths emerge. First, the world cannot give us what we think we need. Second, the truth is hard to swallow. Life is finite, people leave. Power corrupts. Grief is real. We don't get a map. And third, all the love you've been giving has all been meant for you. Let's discuss this. Because this is dense. I think there are three ways to hear that line. The first is the obvious romantic reading. The person you loved loved you back. Fine, true enough. But this song is bigger than romance. The second is the spiritual sort of non-dual reading, which I think is closer to what Justin Hayward was aiming at. When you love, where does that love come from? The compassion you extend, the patience you extend, the tenderness you extend, the forgiveness you extend. Those capacities don't come from nowhere. They already live in you. So when he says, all the love you've been giving has all been meant for you, I hear him saying something like you are not excluded from the love you give away. That's the key. A lot of us unconsciously live like love is outbound only. I love them. I care for them. I forgive them. I extend grace to them. Meanwhile, we stand outside the circle. We become the one person not included in our own compassion. And I think Justin Hayward is saying, no, that love was never meant to bypass you. The love you recognize in others, the love you cultivate, the love you practice, you belong inside that too. That's where I fall on this reciprocity piece. It's not transactional reciprocity. I loved you, so love me back. Not that. More existential reciprocity. The love you participate in also shapes you. Or maybe even simpler, love changes the lover. Because by now love isn't just a feeling anymore. It's a capacity, a discipline, a way of being in relationship with reality. Okay, so the song moves forward, and boy, then comes the grief. Ugh. The wholeness of this sadness. He has lost the love of his life. And now he has nothing to cling to. He wants someone, something, anything, to save him, tell him, lead him, make meaning for him. He's looking for a way out of this pain. It's unbearable. It would take a miracle to heal him from the pain of this loss. This love was his saving grace. He believed that it was what was going to allow him safe passage through this world of persecution. And now that certainty is gone. Somewhere that love still lives. It used to be in his life. Now it lies out of reach. He dreams of it. He pines after it. But each day he awakens to the truth that he still has to keep making life choices just the same. Even though his certainties about life and love and safety and tenderness have collapsed. And here we arrive at one of the unavoidable realities of ethical adulthood. Grief. If you're not old enough to have lost something precious, you may not fully understand this part of the song. A child cannot understand this kind of loss. But if you live long enough, grief joins the conversation. A family member dies. A friend dies. A body or a mind changes. A marriage ends. A belief collapses. A future you count it on disappears. And no amount of positive thinking can negotiate it away. No philosophy can erase it. No spiritual teaching can make it unhappen. This loss must be acknowledged. The grief must be felt. And then somehow we reorganize our lives around the space that remains. That's our reality. This album feels like a group of people standing at the edge of adulthood, looking around and saying, wait, nobody actually knows what is going on, do they? This may be the first song I've covered that names the central paradox of ethical adulthood so directly. You think you have life figured out. You have the job, the house, the partner, the children. You think you have what you need in order to survive the crush of life and all its nonsense. You have the answer key. You are certified. You are a master. Then life takes from you what you thought was required to live. All your theories about the way things are supposed to be disintegrate. You fall into despair. The grief is unbearable. We start asking questions. We say we want the answers. But Hayward says the truth is hard to swallow. And I think he means something extraordinary. You can learn to live inside a question mark instead of an answer key. Ethical adulthood may be nothing more and nothing less than learning to live inside a question mark instead of an answer key. And then this remarkable conclusion. And if you stop and think about it, you won't believe it's true. That all the love you've been given has all been meant for you. Yep. Still gotta love. Still gotta choose a path. Still gotta live ethically. The seven-year-old Andrea asked, What is this song about? The sixty-two-year-old Andrea can now answer I'm still working it out. Because there are no good answers to why. There may be good answers only in the how. And I think the answer might be somewhere in a question of balance. This has been season two of Ethical Adulthood. I'm Andrea Fiando. And I want to thank you for listening.