I Have Questions

I have questions.

This is rarely good news for anyone who happens to be nearby. It usually starts innocently enough. Someone mentions something in conversation, I notice something I’ve never noticed before, or I encounter one tiny piece of information that doesn’t fit neatly into whatever I thought I already knew. Most reasonable people would acknowledge this new information and continue with their day. I am not most reasonable people.

I need to know why. Or when. Or who decided that. Or whether it has always been that way. Or, perhaps most dangerously, what happens if…

That last one has consumed a considerable amount of my life because one question rarely stays one question. I look something up expecting a quick answer and discover there is history involved. History means context. Context introduces people. People have stories. One of those stories contains something else I didn’t know, and suddenly I have seven browser tabs open and absolutely no memory of what I originally came here to find.

I’ve gone looking for the meaning of a word and somehow ended up reading about where the word came from, how its meaning changed, who first used it in print, and why two groups of people remain deeply committed to disagreeing about its pronunciation. I’ve heard a piece of music and needed to know who wrote it, which led to who performed it, which led to what else they recorded, which led to another musician, another song, and eventually me sitting there forty-five minutes later thinking, “Well, apparently this is what we’re doing today.”

I retain some of this information. Other parts apparently enter my brain, look around, and decide there isn’t adequate parking.

None of this is helped by the fact that we now carry around little rectangles capable of answering almost any ridiculous question the moment it occurs to us. There was once a time when you could wonder about something and simply not know. Maybe you’d remember to look it up later. Maybe you’d ask someone. Maybe the question would disappear completely and you would go on to live a perfectly productive life. Those days are over. Now I can know immediately, which is an irresponsible amount of power to give someone like me.

There are, of course, limits. Sometimes I look something up, read the answer, and discover that I have absolutely no idea what the answer means. This creates a new question, followed by another search, followed by the realization that understanding this particular subject may require knowledge I was apparently supposed to acquire several questions ago. At that point I have a choice. I can stop, and occasionally I even do. But curiosity has always had a way of making one more question feel completely reasonable.

I don’t remember when I became this way. Maybe I always was. I suspect there was never a single moment when I decided I wanted to know things. I just kept noticing how interesting everything became when I asked another question.

And I don’t mean only the big things. I want to know why a phrase exists. I want to know how something works. I want to know why we’ve always done something one way when another way seems perfectly possible. I want to know who decided the rule, what existed before it, and whether anyone has ever considered changing it. Sometimes I just want to know what a button does, which is a particular form of curiosity that has produced mixed results.

But underneath all those questions, useful and otherwise, I think there has always been something else happening. Every time I ask why, I’m admitting there might be something I don’t know. Every time I ask how, I’m acknowledging someone might know something I don’t. Every time I ask what happened, I’m accepting that the story might be larger than the piece I’ve already heard. And every time I ask what if, I’m leaving open the possibility that things don’t necessarily have to stay exactly as they are.

I didn’t understand any of that when I started asking questions.

I just wanted to know what the button did.

There is, however, a difference between asking questions about things and asking questions about ourselves. Things are easier. A word does not care if I misunderstand its origin. A song is not offended if I get the story behind it wrong. A button may have consequences, which we have already established, but it generally does not require me to reconsider anything particularly important about myself.

People and ideas are different.

Somewhere along the way, my questions started changing. I still wanted to know how things worked and why things were the way they were, but I also started asking questions that were considerably less comfortable. Why do I think that? Where did I learn it? Is it actually true, or have I simply believed it for so long that I’ve stopped examining it?

And then there’s the question that really knows how to ruin an otherwise perfectly pleasant afternoon.

What if I’m wrong?

I don’t particularly enjoy being wrong. I don’t know many people who do. There is a brief and deeply inconvenient moment when new information arrives and you realize it is not going to fit comfortably beside what you already believe. Something has to move, and my first instinct is not always intellectual enlightenment. Sometimes it’s more along the lines of, “Are we absolutely sure?”

Perhaps there are additional sources. Maybe everyone could review their work. Surely there is a reasonable explanation that allows me to absorb this new information while changing absolutely nothing else.

Unfortunately, curiosity can be annoyingly persistent.

If I’m willing to ask a question when I don’t understand how something works, I have to be willing to ask one when I don’t understand someone else’s experience. If I want more context when I’m reading about history, I should probably want more context when someone’s story doesn’t fit neatly inside what I thought I knew about the world. And if I believe asking questions is how we learn, I don’t get to limit that principle to questions whose answers are unlikely to inconvenience me.

That doesn’t mean every belief needs to be treated as temporary or that conviction and curiosity can’t exist in the same person. There are things I believe deeply and values I don’t approach as though I’m waiting for someone to talk me out of them. But I’ve become increasingly interested in leaving a little space beside what I know for the possibility that there is still something I don’t.

That space has given me some of the most useful questions I’ve learned to ask. What am I missing? What don’t I understand? Whose voice haven’t I heard yet?

They don’t always change my mind. Sometimes they give me a better reason for believing what I already believed. Sometimes they complicate something I wanted to be simple. Sometimes they lead to an answer I don’t particularly like. But sometimes they introduce me to a version of the world I couldn’t see from where I was standing.

That’s when I began to understand that curiosity can do more than help us know things.

It can move us.

The more I thought about that, the more I noticed how much of moving forward begins with someone being willing to ask a question. Not necessarily a brilliant question. Not necessarily one anyone else recognizes as important at the time. Sometimes it’s simply, “Why does it have to work this way?” or “What would happen if we tried something else?” Somewhere between accepting the world exactly as we find it and imagining something different, there is usually a question sitting there causing trouble.

I like that.

Questions are troublemakers. They interrupt the comfortable answer. They poke at the thing everyone has agreed not to examine too closely. They are particularly inconvenient around phrases like “That’s just how it’s done,” which has always sounded less like an explanation and more like an invitation to ask several follow-up questions.

Some questions move science forward. Some change how we understand history. Some challenge rules or traditions that have survived largely because nobody stopped long enough to ask who they were serving. Others change only a conversation, a relationship, or the way one person understands another.

I don’t think those are small changes.

Moving forward isn’t always a giant leap. Sometimes it’s sitting across from someone whose life looks nothing like yours and being curious enough to ask instead of assume. Sometimes it’s hearing something that doesn’t match your experience and resisting the urge to use your own life as evidence that theirs can’t possibly be true. Sometimes it’s asking, “Can you tell me more?” and then doing the considerably harder work of listening to the answer.

I haven’t always been good at that. Curiosity doesn’t automatically make us understanding. You can ask a thousand questions and still spend the entire time waiting for your turn to talk. You can collect facts about people without ever actually knowing them. The question only opens the door. At some point, you have to be willing to walk through it.

And sometimes what you find on the other side changes you. Usually not dramatically. There isn’t always a cinematic moment where the music swells and you announce that you now see the world differently. More often, a piece of information settles beside something you already knew. Someone’s story complicates an assumption. A conversation stays with you longer than you expected. Eventually you realize the borders of what you understand have moved a little.

I think that’s what I mean when I say I want to remain delightfully curious about all the things.

Not endlessly skeptical or incapable of conviction. Not standing in the cereal aisle demanding peer-reviewed evidence before selecting Cheerios. Just curious enough to remember that my view of the world is exactly that. My view. Curious enough to wonder what someone else can see from where they’re standing, admit when I don’t know, and change when I learn something that asks me to.

Because answers are useful. I love answers. Answers satisfy the little part of my brain that opened the first browser tab several hours ago and has been wondering ever since how we got here.

But questions do something answers can’t.

They leave the door open.

Eventually, of course, I find my way back to the original question. This is easier said than done when there are now eleven tabs open, two appear to be answering questions I don’t remember asking, and one has been sitting there so long that closing it feels less like browser maintenance and more like giving up on a dream.

Sometimes the answer is fascinating. Sometimes it’s surprisingly complicated. Sometimes I read three paragraphs and discover the answer could have been “because that’s how they make them,” which feels like information that could have been delivered considerably earlier.

And sometimes the answer doesn’t matter nearly as much as everything I found while looking for it.

A question about a word can lead into history. A question about a song can introduce me to someone I’ve never heard before. A question about why something works the way it does can make me wonder whether it has to work that way at all. A question asked of another person can take me somewhere I couldn’t have reached from my own experience.

I don’t think curiosity has made me someone who knows more than everyone else. If anything, the opposite has happened. The more I’ve learned, the more aware I’ve become of how much I don’t know. Every answer seems to reveal another hallway with more doors, and apparently I am incapable of walking past a door without at least wondering what’s behind it.

Maybe that’s not a problem to solve.

There was a time when knowing felt like the goal. Know the answer. Know what you believe. Know where you stand. Know enough that eventually you can stop asking so many questions and confidently explain things to everyone else.

I’m less interested in that version of knowing now.

I’d rather remain delightfully curious about all the things. About people and ideas. About stories I haven’t heard yet and places I haven’t seen. About why we do what we do, how we got here, and whether there might be another way forward. About the things I believe and the things I haven’t thought to question yet.

And yes, about completely unnecessary things that will contribute absolutely nothing to the advancement of humanity. Those questions aren’t going anywhere.

In fact, while writing this, I started wondering about that strip of fabric across the bottom of hotel beds.

You know the one.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times. I’ve never known what it’s called. I don’t know whether it’s decorative, practical, or part of a vast hospitality conspiracy to give us somewhere to put the throw pillows we’re immediately removing from the bed.

I could leave that question alone. I have other things to do. I’ve just written an entire essay. There is no meaningful way this information will improve my life.

But there is a little rectangle sitting right here that knows the answer.

So now I have another question.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.