Writing | Relationships
The Proust Questionnaire Answered by Tree Langdon, CPA, CGA
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“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.” Margaret Atwood
Sometimes your answers reveal more about you than you realize.
This is in response to a Slack Challenge, where I’ve asked writers to answer a shortened version of the Proust Questionnaire.
At first, I wrote it straight, with short quick answers to the questions. Then I found the prose in my heart, trailing my fingertips along the walls, inhaling a sweet vanilla scent of the words.
For the complete challenge, read this article.
Here goes.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
- Snorkeling with my family from a sailboat in Belize, I sink beneath a cool azure liquid where colorful creatures of the light dance around my face, seeking to find a way to kiss my eyes.
2. What is your greatest fear?
- I’m afraid of leaving the lure of life to sink into the rot beside the worms performing magic as they assist us all in our long slow dance to feed the earth. Unless that is why I’m here — to feed the earth.
3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
- Laziness. Sometimes I feel slow memories held within my bones and I slide into the fibers where I slowly sip from each offering, savoring them on my tongue. It’s not a bad thing to linger in this experience.
4. Which living person do you most admire?
- Michelle Obama. She’s a representative of unlimited imagination that reflects the love of a well-lived childhood and offers the same heart to everyone she meets.
5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
- Perfection. It’s the embodiment of a statue held unmoving for eternity like the wives of Lot in salted mounds standing in witness.
6. On what occasion do you lie?
- When the truth will hurt someone I love. Doubting my truth is always an act of disablement that I will trade for their protection by giving my silence.
7. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
In life, I focus on encouraging my overuse of the word allowance, the art of being still inside myself while remaining detached from past stories so I can release them, making room for new adventures.
8. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
- My husband. Infused with wonder, I stand beside him in the winter of my life, with a gathering of hope that reveals the integrity of our love.
9. When and where were you happiest?
- Living life as a spiritual practice, breathing into each moment brings me to the realization that nothing else matters.
10. Which talent would you most like to have?
- I’d love to be the one who stands and feels the words in the tale. To be the one that starts to sing, of jeweled beasts and craggy keeps and gardens full and lush with fruit and daughters blushing in their silks. The one who tells the tales to the souls gathered at the circle in the flickering firelight.
11. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
- I want to stand fearlessly and speak about the times that I’ve listened and missed something completely. And how I listened again and heard something completely different. And how there is so much to learn from each other.
12. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- Raising a family of four, happy young adults. Sharing the intricate steps in the dance of parenting, trying to be supportive but not too intrusive. And in the end, being able to forgive it all and bring love to it all.
13. Where would you most like to live?
- For a short time, I’d move to India or Asia, but I’m happy to live where I am now in Canada. The location isn’t as important as the intention. I want to open my mind and continue to step through every portal, even as I hold my lover close and whisper invocations in his ears.
14. What do you most value in your friends?
- Loyalty. When another holds your secrets in their innermost keep and shields you with a cloak of invisibility, they impart a gift beyond all treasure.
15. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
- I’m a tea-sipping, dyed in the wool Jane Austin fanatic, admiring her ability to imagine wildly complex relationships while holding on to the hope of finding love in a world full of restraint.
16. Who are your heroes in real life?
- Those that are passionate about human rights and the environment. I want to join them in celebration of our lives and savor the thoughts and tastes and touch and smells of living life here on this earth at this time.
17. What is your greatest regret?
- I wish I became a scientist and I find solace in the math of nature in my garden. On the surface, nature is a messy place. Deep beneath all the layers is a secret logic reflected over and over again. Certain elements abstracted from the math of things belong to the earth.
18. What is your motto?
- You have the key, the world awaits.
“Arise and take the hardest step to love that is beyond the walls. Go find your truth outside the gate You have the key, the world awaits.” Tree Langdon
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