The Reason I Ask Questions Instead of Giving Answers

This topic could go very deep, but for here, I’m only going to scratch at the surface of it. I live in the South, and around here the Southern answer would be: ‘that’s what Jesus did in the Bible… he answered questions with a question.’ But that’s mimicry without any real reason. Another answer could be to tease or aggravate; strike up a smile at the unexpected. The real reason I give questions though, is out of my complex thought.

It is my brain churning the options, evaluating the perspectives, predicting the outcomes, reading the circumstances, calculating the depth of involvement and looking at whatever the situation may be, from any and all angles I can conjure up in my mind. Some people call this overthinking; personally, I call it deep thinking.

Most things in life are not as simple as black and white. There is almost always a gray area in just about every situation. This is where my brain functions. It has been trained over time to hover somewhere in this middle gray area; examining one direction or another before deciding which way makes the most sense. My brain just instantly thinks of all variables and possibilities over any given moment. I learned at an early age that my mind is the only defense I really have. Sure, I’m physically apt and capable, but it’s how I can absorb and contemplate a situation that will get me through whatever I’m in.

You know that age when children start to discover the world around them? They observe everything, soaking it all in. But then their little minds get confused trying to understand things they’ve never pondered before. Like, the sky is blue. It’s always been blue on pretty days like this… but why is it blue? Why does it change to different colors? What makes it blue? Is there a crayon in the sky? These are the things we take for granted and ignore every day, while there are millions of little brains out there just bursting with unanswered questions.

I’ve always been inquisitive. Even at a young age, I would ponder something to death until I had reached the end of my current understanding, and only then would I ask… but my questions were not usually questions of ‘why’, so much as something specific; such as: which came first – the chicken or the egg? (yes, I really did ask this as a child – my mother has documentation of it).

My children would also question me, a lot, especially with ‘why’. While this got to be incredibly annoying (I had an over-why-er) I tried to give them the answers they were seeking. Maybe not always in depth, maybe not explained well enough where they fully understood, maybe not even in a nice voice, as frustration would settle in… but I didn’t want to ignore their need for understanding. Although I will admit, that I didn’t always do this – especially as a new mother, as time teaches us all.

I wanted my children to question things – even me (which would often hold me accountable to question myself). I didn’t want them to mindlessly follow what they were told, simply 'because I said so'. I wanted to teach them to think for themselves and not follow someone (even me) along like mindless sheep. I didn’t want them to lose that sense of wonder, of asking, of learning – I wanted them to feel like their inquisitiveness mattered. (On a side note, we did have regular talks with each of our children about the possibility of times when they would need to listen to us, without any understanding, in situations of danger or emergency – so we had a code word for when those moments would happen.)

We’ve all had that thirst for knowledge in childhood. Even you had that blossom of wonder once. There was a time when you didn’t know all that you know. Regardless of how old you were when it changed, once upon a time, each of us was yearning to know more, to quench our thirst for knowledge and learn all we could about the people and the world around us – to discover the unknown.

Somewhere throughout life though, we tend to lose that wonder and curiosity… and the familiarity of it all starts masquerading as a comfortable standard of understanding.

But what if we still kept that inquisitiveness about life and the things around us? What if we didn't stop questioning things, and we didn't just accept things are the way we've been told? What if it's not about the answers, but it's really about the questions?

It's often the questions that we aren't asking that are the questions that most need to be asked.

I believe that's what wisdom truly is - accepting what we don't know, looking deeper and realizing how much there is left to be questioned... and then questioning it with an open mind.

I have found that the best answers rarely end my questions. They only give me better questions to continue asking. In seeking out my own truths, and in questioning my own certainties, I began noticing how easily we tend to stop questioning things. We simply accept and move on. Sometimes life won’t allow us to question things. Sometimes we’re too weary to wonder. Sometimes the answer is comfortable enough that we don’t want to look underneath it. Sometimes we trust too much. And there are times when certainty simply feels safer than admitting what we don’t know.

But what if we didn’t? What if we stopped looking at things as if we knew them and began to look at everything in life as if it was our first time seeing it all. If you woke up in your world tomorrow and had never known anything about life, the world, people, anything – it was all brand new. What would your questions be? How differently would you see things? How differently would you think?

I’m not suggesting we should abandon what we know.

I’m merely suggesting that we not be so certain, that we lose the desire to take a deeper look and question what we think we know.

What if the thing you’ve been the most certain about, is the thing you most need to question?