Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
I recently read a book by poet Pablo Neruda called The Book of Questions. It was literally just page after page of these outlandish and beautiful questions that Neruda dared to ask. Neruda was once called “The Astute Hunter.” This title was bestowed on him because his vocation was to seek the roots of belonging wherever he found himself. In other words, he refused to let any circumstances, location or environment become commonplace. He needed a contentment in his present in order to feel he belonged there. And wonder was what fueled his exploration towards belonging. In the preface to the book it said Neruda sought to “integrate the wonder of a child with the experience of an adult. He craves clarity rendered from the examined life, while refusing to be corralled by his rational mind.”
When we ask questions, even questions that we think we already know the answers to, we are integrating wonder into our life. We refuse to let what our adult mind says is rational stand in the way of what could be. Where there is mystery, there is wonder. The very act of asking a question is the admittance that there is more to be explored.
We stop asking questions we lose interest. We lose interest, we lose wonder. We lose wonder, we lose hope and purpose and dreams and joy. We can’t afford to lose wonder.
“Be patient with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Mandy, I love this post!! I can especially relate…well really, must listen to the last quote where she talks about “Don’t search for the answers”…..I’m always searching and trying to figure things out….place them in their respective boxes. Possibly I don’t have the box yet for certain answers?? Thanks for another well written and thoughtful post
These Week of Wonder posts remind me of something I asked myself this past Saturday. My husband and I were driving to dinner and it was cloudy. As I was looking at the sky I wondered when I stopped seeing cloud shapes. Somewhere between childhood and 30-something I lost it. I still day dream…that’s just part of my make up. But that part of my imagination died. I looked back at the clouds and saw shapes…for the first time in ages.
I think we also stop asking questions because we figure we know it all.
Or we figure we should know it all since we’re all grown up. Glad you saw shapes in the clouds again!
I still ask tons of questions (I was the very annoying “why” child) and I seek the answers. Constantly challenging myself to learn to facts, new skills, new information about different parts of the planet, cultures, religions. Curiosity is my middle name. But I also think it makes life far more interesting to learn new things. You never know when a crazy fact or new skill will come in handy.
Yes, you are the renaissance woman, I can attest to that!