The Years That Question, The Years That Answer
Created at: August 10, 2025
There are years that ask questions and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston
Time’s Conversational Rhythm
To begin, Hurston’s line treats time as a conversation. Some years interrogate our assumptions—with loss, moves, upheavals—while others offer resolution: clarity about work, love, place. By casting years as alternating speakers, she dignifies uncertainty as a phase, not a failure. The wisdom lies in recognizing the rhythm and refusing to force premature answers. Moreover, this conversational view tempers urgency. When a year is asking, our task is attentiveness: collecting data, listening, experimenting. When a year is answering, our duty shifts to commitment: implementing what we have learned. Such pacing keeps growth humane.
Janie’s Seasons of Becoming
In Hurston’s own narrative arc, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) shows this cadence through Janie Crawford. Her brief marriage to Logan Killicks asks what love is; life with Joe Starks answers with status yet silences her voice; afterward, Tea Cake invites a new question—can joy survive risk? The Okeechobee hurricane scene answers brutally, yet it grants Janie hard-won self-knowledge. Returning to Eatonville, she gathers up the "pear tree" dream from girlhood, now reframed by experience. The years have spoken, and she can, at last, answer herself.
History’s Question Marks and Answers
On a broader canvas, Hurston wrote amid the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression. The 1920s asked who the "New Negro" might be—Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) pressed the question—while the crash of 1929 demanded economic meaning. The New Deal (1933–1939) answered with the WPA, the CCC, and the Social Security Act (1935), yet these replies were partial, leaving Black workers often excluded or segregated. History, then, echoed Hurston’s cadence: policy responses resolved some dilemmas while generating new ones about equity and citizenship.
The Fieldworker’s Loop of Inquiry
Beyond fiction, Hurston’s anthropology formalized the loop. In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she enters communities posing open questions, then receives answers in folktales, songs, and rituals that complicate her hypotheses. This is classic ethnographic rhythm: participant observation moves from estrangement to understanding and back again. As Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage (1909) and Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) show, cultures navigate change through liminal stages; inquiry stretches identity, and ritual re-aggregates it. Hurston’s fieldwork makes time itself a rite: questioning years separate, answering years reintegrate.
Exploration, Integration, and Psychological Growth
From a psychological standpoint, growth similarly alternates between exploration and integration. Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950) frames adolescence as a tension between role confusion and identity; resolution arrives only after sustained questioning. Later research on post-traumatic growth—Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996)—shows how narratives formed after adversity become the "answer" that reorganizes values, relationships, and goals. Importantly, integration cannot be rushed; meaning-making depends on time to metabolize experience. Hence Hurston’s cadence offers compassion for messy middles.
Living the Cadence in Practice
Finally, applying this cadence can be practical. Organize the year into seasons that deliberately diverge and converge: dedicate one quarter to experiments and mentors, then another to focus and delivery. Product teams already use such cycles—Jake Knapp’s Sprint (2016) and Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup (2011) institutionalize diverge–converge loops—so individuals can do likewise. Schedule "question months" for interviews, prototypes, and reading; set "answer months" for commitments, routines, and deep work. By honoring the alternation, we let time speak in full sentences—and we learn when to listen and when to decide.