Not All Those Who Wonder Are Lost

Not All Those Who Wonder Are Lost

AN ODE TO QUESTIONS

by Romina Dominzain University Innovation Fellow and former Faculty Champion Universidad de Montevideo

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

What am I doing? Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What is the meaning of (my) life? What is all this? Last year I found myself with a lot of free time. Maybe “too much” for my ideal of existence back then: productive, full of work projects and side hustles. What started as more time for leisure, fun, and self-discovery ended with a lot of questions. Big and existential questions that I started collecting and journaling about. What describes us? Our history? Told how? Our ambitions? Our plans? What are we doing, saying, hearing, thinking, or feeling?

As an Engineer, I tend to treat questions like problems that need to be solved. I feel attracted to embark on finding ‘good’ solutions, hoping to discover a better solution than what already exists or I just know, secretly dreaming to discover the best, right possible solution. And as a Fellow, Faculty Champion, and educator; Design Thinking has been more than a tool for me, a mindset, sometimes almost a religion. It is attractive to think we can design everything: our home, life, relationships, and job. But it is anguishing not being able to find what we are looking for. What if for some problems there are no solutions? Do questions always have correct, right, or better answers?

I feel we live in a culture that prefers answers and solutions over questions and problems. From our early childhood, teachers deliver us answers, sometimes to questions nobody asked. When they ask us questions they are just meant to be answered, brainstormed on, only a medium for the solution. And sometimes we are even requested to reply in the shortest possible time to be considered smart or efficient enough. It embarrasses me to admit that I am that kind of teacher sometimes! But on my behalf, I think the praise for fast answers is just our adult default mode. Isn’t education a form of question instead of answer? What is the role of doubt in the act of creating and innovating?

We get inspired by TED talks, social media posts, books, and stories from people who share their trouble (only) when they found, or think they found, a solution for it. The majority of our popular narratives are based on the hero’s journey: the common template that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Can we only learn from heroes? What about people who failed or did not find some answers? Where are the antiheroes portrayed? What about the problems that do not have an answer yet? How to…, ten tips to…, the tricks I applied to get…, everything you need to know about…, what you should do to avoid…these are the titles of the content we share, buy and consume. What is true? How do we recognize the truth? I believe the world is full of lies and half-truths. The only thing I can do as an antidote is to question more.

As Maria Popova says in my favorite blog The Marginalian: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

What questions do you ask? What don’t you question? Who don’t you question?

For centuries, human beings, especially philosophers, artists and writers, have been asking, and sometimes answering, questions. For me, the best answers don’t provide a clear-cut path to follow but leave me with more questions. Reading philosophy and literature gives me comfort in knowing that these questions have been asked before, that they are still relevant and will always be. We are not alone in our existential quests. Questions are what make us human. They are a sign that we are self-aware enough to wonder about our place in the world and what we want our lives to mean. Not all those who wonder are lost. What if we consume more content that brings us questions? How can we integrate digging into big questions into our STEM education philosophy, literature and art?

When I go to conferences where speakers deliver motivational addresses, I always hear students asking questions that expect straightforward answers, fast tips, and advice like: What would you say to your younger self? What would you recommend me to get…? And often he (the speaker is frequently a man) seems happy giving advice on very personal issues. That brings me more questions… How do we discern useful advice? When do we really need help and when do we just need to search for our own way of living? How do people who present as mentors, who seem to have it all figured out, impact on our doubting selves? Do they really have it all figured out?

Habits, rules, recipes, and lists for success, happiness, and health rise and become trending topics. They are eclipsing our doubts, failures, and misfortunes that are part of our everyday and real lives, that complete our wholehearted humanity.

In her book, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt expands on the importance of doubts:

Simone Weil wrote, “Doubt is a virtue of intelligence.” As with every other principle, enshrining doubt as the highest principle in thought may become merely another excuse for intolerance, but I believe there are forms of doubt that are virtuous. Doubt is less attractive than certainty to most people. The kind of doubt I am thinking of doesn’t swagger. It doesn’t shake its finger in your face, and it doesn’t go viral on the Internet. Newspapers do not write about it. Military parades do not march to tunes of doubt. Politicians risk mockery if they admit to it. In totalitarian regimes people have been murdered for expressing doubt. Although theologians have understood its profound value, religious fanatics want nothing to do with it. The kind of doubt I am thinking of begins before it can be properly articulated as a thought. It begins as a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling that something is wrong, an as-yet-unformed hunch, at once suspended and suspenseful, which stretches toward the words that will turn it into a proper question framed in a language that can accommodate it. Doubt is not only a virtue in intelligence; it is a necessity. Not a single idea or work of art could be generated without it, and although it is often uncomfortable, it is also exciting. And it is the well-articulated doubt, after all, that is forever coming along to topple the delusions of certainty.

And poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and poet Franz Xaver Kappus: I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

What is the conclusion of all this? I don’t know. I prefer to leave it open and keep asking. What questions are still unsolved in your heart? You can share them with me through romi.dominzain@ gmail.com and I will send you some of my favorite questions in exchange.