Asking questions that shape us
The favourite childhood question: Why is the sky blue?
Children, in their boundless curiosity and uninhibited desire to connect, are an endless, and wonderful fount of questions:
Why is the sky blue?
How can birds fly?
Why do I have to go to school?
Why do we die?
Are we there yet?
Schools and workplaces that recognise questions as a foundation of innovation and problem solving, encourage rich, big questions.
However, our questions become fewer over the years, kept at bay by the busyness, joys, pain, responsibilities, anxieties, distractions, and increased inhibition and expectations of teenage years and adulthood.
What would life, our world look like if we continued to nurture the curiosity and questions of childhood through the teenage years and life? If we all were reminded and learned to sit without distraction, with silence, to savour the moments of illumination that elevate us out of the day to day. And then to ask beautiful questions; about life, our future life, our future selves, each other, work, business, relationships...
"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and 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."