This Indigo Girls’ classic offers an exploration of the search for meaning and the exhaustion that comes from it. Written by Emily Saliers — an English major and daughter of a prominent theology professor — the song is a poke at the insular world of academia and the search for a singular, perfect truth. She describes the song as a “process of elimination:” after looking for answers from doctors, philosophers and the mountains, the narrator realizes that the demand for a definitive answer is actually what prevents us from feeling “fine.”

The song identifies a subtle but pervasive barrier to connection: the demand for certainty. When we are ever focused on being “right” or finding the one “correct” way to live, how might we become rigid and unavailable to the messy, ambiguous reality of the world around us? By accepting that “there’s more than one answer to these questions,” how might we lean into a softer, more flexible way of being that embraces the unknown?