Questions and Statements

By Louanne Learning · Jan 4, 2023 · ·
  1. We are born asking questions. My mother likes to tell the story of newborn me being placed in her arms for the very first time. The memory is engraved in her heart and in her mind, such a strong impression it made. The little bundle I was looked her right in the eye, asking, “Well, you’ve got me now. What are you going to do with me?”

    And ever since, I have been asking, “What does this mean?”

    Where do questions come from? A need to know and understand. Curiosity, surely. Riddle me this, riddle me that. The pull of the interesting. Taking the outside world in. Expanding your horizons. Existence is so exceptionally complex and bit by bit we seek to broaden our understanding of it. People are so complex. Let’s broaden our understanding of them, too. We want to make sense of the stupefying dynamics that surround and inhabit us. Any attempt to penetrate reality begins with questioning it.

    We cannot simply “believe.” We need to question. In my case, I can’t even take the credit for it. It is an imperative of my brain. I am fully aware of my own thinking as something separate from me. My brain has its own agenda. It has its ways. Nothing to do with me. But I go along for the ride, and learn a thing or two while we soak it all in.

    Oh, I don’t expect to ever get all the answers. But it’s an amazing trip, to this river, or this lake, or this mountain. Question-asking is powerful. It’s a certain buzz, to find out or assess something you didn’t know before. Understanding dawns brightly. Understanding is what a brain was made to do.

    But I know people who don’t ask a lot of questions. They make statements. Their source of information comes from inside rather than outside. They know it all already. They operate on assumptions that they take for fact. It’s a kind of isolation. How can you develop connections to a world you never explore?

    The questioner in me wants to understand them, too. Are they happy? Are they delusional? Does thinking pain them? What happened to their curiosity? What are they afraid of? Why can’t they see the other side?

    Questions open doors; statements close them. Gotta let some breeze blow through.

    About Author

    Louanne Learning
    Just a regular gal with a lot of questions seeking answers.
    Madman likes this.

Comments

  1. Louanne Learning
    “The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

    ― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
  2. Earp

    Isn’t life a collection of weird quizzes with no answers to half the questions?

    - Pawan Mishra
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  3. Louanne Learning
    Is that your estimate? About half? Oh man, there are just so many different types of questions. I think I was referring to the ones that help you understand your reality and the people who populate it. The ones you ask and answer (sometimes with research, sometimes with broad, logical thinking) to increase your knowledge.

    For example, understanding the behavior of others. The question to be asked is, "Why are they acting that way?" The more you read about human behavior, and the more perspectives you adopt in your thinking, the closer to reality your answer will be. But some people don't go through the process. They don't ask the question. They just go with the first assumptions that pop into their mind.

    But divergent and evaluation questions are good, too! Questioning is a skill and the more you do it, the more informed you will be.
  4. Earp
    I was thinking more about the idea that every answer just leads to new questions, and the older I get, the less I seem to know. If I make it another decade, I expect to be a complete dolt.
      Louanne Learning likes this.
  5. Louanne Learning
    Lol, you just reminded me of the Dunning Kruger Effect, which in part states that the more we learn about a particular topic, the more we come to realize how little we do know. We begin to appreciate the complexity of things. What did Socrates say? I know that I know nothing. (or something like that). But we got to explore that ocean, one drop at a time.
  6. off
    A contrarian view to the above is that we know everything. I believed that of myself when I was sixteen.

    Yeah, questions are good, but after a while a body (or rather, a mind) will not ask them, but answer them. Figure out the answer for himself or herself, a little bit similarly to back-engineering reality. Questions, by adults, are by the lazy; the eager and keen will instead figure out the relationships and causality within a phenomenon's processes by relying on his or her previously acquired knowledge.
      Louanne Learning likes this.
    1. Louanne Learning
      Sounds like we are in agreement. But questions have to be asked before they can be answered.
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