I Believe in the Power of Questions

I believe our lives are set up in a series of questions. Should I? Or shouldn’t I? This school or that school? What career? Which job? Will they like me, will they not? When’s snack time? But truthfully all of these things have one thing in common – they are questions….

Now, I’m not sure where you come from, some of you may have children, some may know children; I on the other hand, spent three summers between college semesters being a full-time nanny to two young, rambunctious boys.

During the first summer, my mornings with these boys were not filled with cartoons but with an incessant, never ending stream of questions. This by no means is an exaggeration.

Why aren’t you in pajamas? Can I have steak for breakfast? Why not? Who says? Why is the sky blue? – Truly never ending until breakfast was served and their attention was diverted.

This is the essence of childhood that even though in those moments of pure verbal exhaustion, I have now begun to realize its power. In my last summer with the boys, I asked the younger of the two “why after I answer a question, you give me another.” In all of his wisdom gathered in his short life, he replied back to me “I need to keep finding better questions.”

How true is that. When you’ve got an answer, it’s time to find better questions.

That is the basis of how I believe I should live. It is the acceptance of realizing you won’t ever completely know something but in the same moment, completely understanding.

I once randomly picked up a book by a Rabbi named Irwin Kula and in one of his initial chapters he addresses this very concept.

He states: “There are never final answers to life’s big questions; only more profound questions. There’s something so liberating and expansive about this teaching. The search for truth is not about letting go; it’s about going deeper. The goal is not teaching a single realization but living the process of realizing again and again.”

There may not be final answers to life’s big questions as Kula states, but I like to think that what we can achieve each day is the stepping-stones of realization.

I believe that we must constantly ask ourselves questions to challenge adversity and to improve our self-being. Nothing is ever fully completed – you will learn new things every day and allow what you have already learned to form those new, intelligent questions.