The Hundred

one hundred questions for the person you are becoming

The book carries eighteen questions across ten years. Here are one hundred more — the deeper well they were drawn from. Ten constellations of ten. You can read them all, or you can do the braver thing:

 

Draw one question

Take the one you're given. Carry it for a day before answering.
If it opens something, seal your answer into September 02036.

Tonight

  1. What did you almost not notice today that deserves the whole page?
  2. If tonight had a gate name, what would it be?
  3. What is true right now that you keep postponing saying out loud?
  4. Who would be surprised to know you thought of them today?
  5. What are you pretending not to know tonight?
  6. If a stranger handed you a book tonight, what would you need it to say?
  7. What did you carry into this room that appears on no packing list?
  8. What would make tonight the night you tell the story about?
  9. What question have you been avoiding so carefully you forgot it was there?
  10. What is the bravest true sentence you can write right now?

The One Who's Coming

  1. Your future self is remembering tonight. What did they keep?
  2. What do you already know about the person you'll be in ten years that you've never admitted?
  3. What are they no longer afraid of — and when did that start?
  4. What would they thank you for doing this month?
  5. What would they beg you to stop doing?
  6. What do they miss about being you, now?
  7. Which of your current problems did they simply outgrow rather than solve?
  8. What one sentence do you most need said back to you across ten years?
  9. Where are they sitting when they finally reread your words?
  10. What is the first thing your future remembers you doing next?

The One You Were

  1. What did ten-years-ago-you get right that you've since talked yourself out of?
  2. What promise did you make as a child that you're still quietly keeping?
  3. What was thin about last year? It still counts. What grew anyway?
  4. Which old version of you deserves an apology — and which deserves a thank-you?
  5. What did you survive that you've never once called surviving?
  6. What have you kept from every place you've ever lived?
  7. When did you last feel like the person you were before your job title?
  8. What story about your past have you polished so much it stopped being true?
  9. What was the wrong turn that turned out to be the way?
  10. Who saw something in you before you did — and what was it?

The Work

  1. What are you planting that only strangers will harvest?
  2. What work would you do at the same intensity if no one ever found out?
  3. Which of your gifts is filed under hobby that belongs under calling?
  4. What has hardened into repetition that was meant to be variation?
  5. If your work were a tree, which rings were drought and which were rain?
  6. What are you building that will not be worth cutting for two hundred years?
  7. Whose not-yet-born reader are you working for this year?
  8. What would you make if making it couldn't be measured?
  9. What is your crooked grain — the flaw that makes you unusable for the wrong things?
  10. What did you come here to make that you keep almost starting?

The Others

  1. Who are you when nobody can look you up?
  2. What can only be done together that you keep waiting to do alone?
  3. What did someone give you that they will never know they gave?
  4. Who is carrying something heavy beside you, quietly, right now?
  5. What sliver of yourself do you keep saving for later — and for whom?
  6. Whose name belongs on the line that says someone I was supposed to meet?
  7. What conversation are you one ounce of courage away from having?
  8. Who taught you love by getting it wrong?
  9. What do the people who love you know about you that you refuse to know?
  10. If you could help one person's bloom open this year, whose?

The Body

  1. What is your body storing that looks, from the surface, like nothing?
  2. What has your body forgiven you for that you haven't forgiven yourself?
  3. What did you do at ten years old with your whole body that you now do only with your head?
  4. Where does the dust of your best nights still live in your seams?
  5. What would rest look like if it weren't a reward?
  6. What is the oldest thing your hands know how to do?
  7. When did you last stand still for five real minutes in the dark?
  8. What is your body's thin ring this year?
  9. What sense have you stopped using on purpose?
  10. What will you wish, at ninety, you had done with these exact knees?

The Fear

  1. What are you afraid of that your future self made friends with years ago?
  2. What would you attempt if failing at it still counted as living?
  3. Which fear is actually a compass pointing at the thing?
  4. What is the fifteen-meter platform in your life — the closest you allow yourself to get?
  5. What would you say if you weren't managing how it lands?
  6. Which of your fears did you inherit — and from whom?
  7. What are you protecting that no longer needs protection?
  8. When were you brave in a way nobody witnessed?
  9. What is the difference, for you, between safe and small?
  10. What would you do this year if you knew the crooked tree survives the logging?

Enough

  1. How much is enough — an actual number, an actual shape of a day?
  2. What are you hauling as cargo that was always meant to be fuel?
  3. What did you buy that was really an apology to yourself?
  4. What can't be bought that you keep trying to buy versions of?
  5. Whose definition of success are you still auditioning for?
  6. What would you stop doing tomorrow if money stopped being the reason?
  7. What is your actual currency — the thing you truly trade in?
  8. What do you own that owns you back?
  9. What would generosity look like at your current size, not your someday size?
  10. If nothing about your life could be bought or sold for a week, what would remain?

The Leaving

  1. What do you want read aloud at the fire?
  2. What are you leaving in the seams of the people you love?
  3. Which of your daily acts would still matter a century from now?
  4. What should be given away — writing and all — rather than kept pristine?
  5. What is the one regret you can still prevent from ever existing?
  6. Who inherits your pole — the center you carry?
  7. What will your handwriting tell a stranger about you?
  8. What have you been given that you have not yet given onward?
  9. If your life burns like the temple — what did you write on the walls?
  10. Fire or hands: what deserves to end, and what deserves to be passed on?

Ten Years

  1. It is ten years from tonight. What happened because you were here?
  2. Working backward from that future: what one choice made everything after it possible?
  3. And what made that choice possible? Keep tracing until you arrive at now.
  4. What would a thin ring three years from now look like — and can you accept it in advance?
  5. Which September will be the hardest? What would you tell that September now?
  6. What do you want to be untrue about your life by the fifth ring?
  7. Who will you have to become to keep a ten-year promise?
  8. What are you sealing today that must not be opened early?
  9. What in your life deserves the five-digit year?
  10. When the decade closes: fire, or hands?

Print this page and it becomes a deck. Read one at dinner. Leave one in a borrowed book.
Questions are the only gift that weighs nothing and cannot run out.

← back to the light

This page will never ask you for anything.
No account. No list. It only gives.

— Ian ✦