The Gift of Questions
“I dream of two possible destinations…” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon describes poking around a bookstore in California and finding the book Say It in Yiddish buried on a shelf in the language section. What possible need is there for a travel book in Yiddish, he wondered? Page 254: Can I go by a boat/ferry to …? “The blank in the last of those phrases, impossible to fill in, tantalizes me… could I sail on that boat/ferry… and from what shore?” Chabon’s dream of the two possible destinations led to the writing ofThe Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a detective novel set in the imaginary world of one of these destinations – a postwar Jewish homeland founded on the former Alaska territory, an alternative outcome to WWII where Indians and Jews live in a bilingual tribal/Yiddish mix and featuring new Yiddish slang of Chabon’s own invention (1).
Physicist Sugata Mitra, head in 1999 of research and development for NIIT Technologies in New Delhi, India, wondered about the state of education in a world of not enough teachers and too many places with no schools. He sat in his modern office that was separated from an urban slum by a tall brick wall and asked himself if kids with no education were capable of self-directed learning. He literally cut a hole in the wall, installed a computer with a web browser and watched – in one day they taught each other how to surf the web… in a language, English, that wasn’t their own. More questions, more experiments, more refining led to his School in the Cloud and Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), with kids around the world teaching themselves and each other subjects from biochemistry to mathematics (2).
A question that tantalizes, leading to re-envisioning worlds and outcomes, and writing a published novel; another question that leads someone to literally cut a hole in a brick wall between the limits of education and human capacities for learning to open new futures to kids who had none. What is the gift of question, and how can we use it today to move our personal lives and our communal ones to view new horizons and manifest new todays?
Asking a question puts the swerve in our steps that takes us off the straight, linear path of “how things are” and into the curves and side-roads of what can be. To wonder, to question is to pry around edges seeking hidden doors, to pull dusty books off shelves looking for unseen passageways. The very act of questioning assumes that something exists beyond the known straits of our limited views. In order to formulate a question we have to step out of how we see something now and open to seeing it entirely differently. This big, bold step of courage already teases open a window, setting in motion something dynamic which was previously static. We see things anew, finding solutions outside the frames of our familiar tableau. In our own life walk ‘set in our ways’ becomes ‘journeying’.
To question is to be playful, to be curious, to be interested in the experience of life, and in our world. Questioning is the way of the Dreamer – comfortable with uncertainty, surfing the waves of change; never knowing what lies ahead, beyond the bend, but knowing that something interesting surely does.
Our human family lives today in challenging times. For many, the default in times such as these is to look for certainty, answers, even someone to just tell us what to do, make it all make sense. In fact, we humans have often done quite well in challenging times; being pushed in on all sides often results in our looking upward and out. In the Great Plague of 1665/1666 young Cambridge University student Sir Isaac Newton was sent home in what now is called his ‘wonder year’ where, confined to his estate, he laid the foundations for, and made, many of his famous discoveries in optics, mathematics, and motion. It was in that very garden of confinement that he watched the apple fall, unleashing his powerful questions that led him to his theory of gravity (3).
In an essay titled “The Art of Asking Questions,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that the Nobel prize-winning physicist Isidor Rabi learned to be a scientist from his mother in this way: “Every other child would come back from school and be asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ But my mother used to ask, instead, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’” (4)
What questions tantalize us today? What questions can we ponder as we look out the window to a new perspective, cutting holes in walls that others haven’t been able to peer over? What discoveries are waiting for us to see them, maybe even literally drop in front of us, revealed only now from this new position? In this challenged time can we ask good questions and see things differently, entering 2021 with fresh eyes than those we trained on 2020?
It is the Dreamer who is the visionary – seeing beyond and charting the map to move others to exciting new places; it is the Dreamer who discovers. The tools are in our hands: Curiosity, imagination, and questions – always questions.
What possibilities are you dreaming about today?
1. Michael Chabon, described in the essay “Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts”, June/July 1997 Civilization and October 1997 Harper’s Magazine.
2. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think. Free Press (2012).
3. Sheth, H. “How ‘social distancing’ during the Great Plague led to Newton’s theory of gravity.”
March 16, 2020 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com
4. From the essay titled The Art of Asking Questions by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
