The oxygen of imagination
What I'm learning weeks after a masterclass in asking with Krista Tippett and Sara Hendren
“We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give. Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing."
-Krista Tippett
On January 31, 2024 I released the final episode of Season Six of the Origins Podcast and the inaugural one for a new series of episodes called the Great Askers. We introduced the idea in these commons before, but The Great Askers will be an occasional Origins Podcast extra, where we nourish a sensibility of asking and cultivate great askers in the world by exploring the art of the question with people who have singularly practiced it.
This first conversation is a gift. The idea of the Great Askers, of this conversation, has been with me for years, companion to every conversation I created for Origins or in my research, every book I read, ever-present on my mind. And what this became is even more beautiful and affecting than I'd imagined. I've listened numerous times and it has been something new to me each time – a stunning episode resplendent with insights and wisdom.
It is stunning arrival of the ideas. But it is also a beginning. Across these episodes we will be accumulating wisdom about the art of asking. It will become a 'Better Questions Guide,' a companion to the On Being Project's Better Conversations Guide, a resource for individuals and groups of all scales to the powerful form of using our words that is the question and to all that comes from it. It will be a practical guide to how to ask more generous and generative questions as well as a philosophical guide to what the art of asking means for us individually, for who we are to each other, and for our society itself.
It has now been a few weeks since that episode and a few months since we recorded it. This is an essay on what I've been learning.
Questions elicit answers in their likeness
A selfish question begets a selfish response1. A question asked to make one look good or to diminish the other creates an adversarial conversation; debate, not discourse. But a generous question invites out generosity in return. A great question surprises the asker and its signal is an answer that surprises the person responding.
There's something deeper in this idea of a generous question, something happening in the mind of the asker even before words start to come together. It is a reverence for the other, a deep and authentic curiosity of them. These are the grounds where great questions take shape. It is a deep belief that they are as vivid and complex as you are, the step beyond Walt Whitman's famous line in "Song of Myself, 51", "I am large, I contain multitudes"—that not only do I contain multitudes, but everyone else does, too.
Taking that into a practice of asking, it becomes about drawing out the other, about understanding that every person has immense intelligences and that your questions determine what is invited out of them. In a beautiful and generous way, you form the other by what you ask them, you help invite out of them their intelligences, help them more fully realize and actualize who they are.
Techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier speaks about kindness being something that requires genius. Being kind is an intelligence. We possess many of these intelligences, far beyond the impoverished view that intelligence is monolithic and measurable. What I'm learning is that our questions determine which of the intelligences that we each possess are invited out, are expressed. Understand a person as plural, intelligence as plural, and use questions to invite out a certain intelligence, a level or mode of it. We have the capacity to make, to form, people with our questions.
Just as we have the capacity to draw out the other by what we ask them, we draw out the world by what we ask of it. The greatest scientists have long known this—the primary, perhaps the only, thing that moves you forward is a better question.
A great question is multitudinous
Something I'm realizing is that like ourselves, Great Asking, too, is multitudinous. It is not one mode. It is not one state. It is not one scale.
We all, perhaps, know the experience of moving across scales or feeling more than one scale at once. I feel it when thinking about the fractal patterns that suffuse our universe, integrally linking cells to cities to societies, and in the cosmic view--the universe in 40 steps from atomically small to astronomically vast. This vertiginous and magnificent scale-spanning feeling is what Borges' is writing about with the "Unconscionable Maps" in "On Exactitude in Science," what Baldwin means when he recommends love go into battle with space and time, the disorientation that Teju Cole calls a moment of quiet sorrow, the way of being Tracy K Smith is describing when she says, "We approach the large and the far by means of the near and the small." Literature and poetry abundantly, perhaps definitionally, create this resounding and reverberating across scale.
Crossing scales is the growing edge of science, too. There the language is 'multiscale' and 'fractal' and 'scaling laws' (and sometimes a less humble term: 'universal'). The methods are as multitudinous as science itself, but they share a core feature of treating the whole system: holism.
So the thing about these great writers' and scientists' and thinkers' ability to create this cosmic or multiscale or universal affect is that the construction is more than merely a sentence that ends with a question mark. It is the totality in which a narrative is woven. It is the holism of the method. And so I'm wondering now about the patterns leading up to and and following the questions I ask.
There are different modes of asking
What is becoming clear is that all realms of thought and of describing experience require different patterns or modes of engagement, ways of meeting multitudinous and cross-scale phenomena with multitudinous and cross-scale response. I'm learning that questions are the form of response equal to the task. Questions are the phonemes of a language of mystery.
In these places beyond where our existing concepts and language can reach we need vocabularies of mystery (uncertainty, complexity, poetry, ancient wisdom traditions). If mystery is the performance, the question is its actor; it is how mystery arises, how it is explored and made into something. Teju Cole follows his statement about the moment of quiet sorrow by saying that it is also the anteroom to what the solution, someday, could be. And that is what I'm learning a question truly is.
I shared before that I maintain a practice that I call "Big Questions to Ask Myself"—a list of the questions I encounter or author at any time that I want to hold with me, to come back to and pose to myself. In that list now are, "What modes am I missing?" and "What modes are we (as a society) missing?" Perhaps the Great Askers embody these modes and know how to shift between them, that immense capacity of a flourishing system of seeming to know how to move between modes and when. Perhaps this is a kind of resilience of Great Askers, the way a resilient system shifts between modes based on external conditions and internal capacities. For instance, the body does not adopt one way of fighting off a disease or other external perturbation to the system. Different parts of the body respond in different ways and those ways change across the arc of the disease. The same is true for communities responding to natural hazards--the kind of organization required must evolve as the disaster plays out. These relationships to resilience and adaptive capacity are irresistible and something I'll return to in future essays.
Questions are the manifestation of a state of restlessness
Sara and Krista's are both lives lived restlessly in search of what we don't know. It is this restlessness that is the oxygen of imagination, not answers. Answers are short-lived. Questions expand over longer time. Certainty as a state of being is constrained and brittle, ill-fitted to change. Restlessness presumes change, lives in movement. The questions that emerge from these states carry their characteristics. Restless questions are a form of staying energized rather than resigned2.
The spaciousness of questions matters
Culturally we predominantly hear questions of quantity: 'What?’, ‘How much?’, ‘How soon?’ How do we open these questions? Things like: 'What is worth doing?' and 'How shall we live here?' And two that this provocation raises for me: 'What does it mean to flourish?' and 'Who are we to each other?' These can be uncomfortable. Spaciousness means moving outside of the comfortable, certain, boxes we have defined for ourselves. It inevitably means uncertainty and mystery. It likely means ambiguity and paradox as what we thought was true bristles against what we find in our experience. It often means confronting two contradictory truths that need us to rearrange our worldviews to reconcile. Spacious questions joyfully bring us to these difficult places, recognizing that it is only in them that we change and move.
Great Asking begins long before putting words together. To ask a spacious question begins long before the formation of the question. These questions begin personally, with personal preparation. It begins with preparing oneself to be opened to mystery and the difficulty that will inevitably come from it. This personal preparation is also part of creating the atmosphere of intellectual friendship and freedom that is required for a generous and spacious conversation to take place. Only when the commitment is authentically and personally made to generous questions, when those questions emerge out of an authentic desire to know and to draw out, does an atmosphere conducive to great asking emerge. all of this begins before the question: the personal preparation; the creation of the hospitable spaces in which the questions can be taken up.
Great Asking is practical, too
The details of putting the words together matters, too, and I'm learning many practical things.
Ask questions that would be interesting to the other to answer
The framing of a sentence can leave room at the end of your words: how might this..., what if..., what might be..., I wonder whether...
What sounds like the most simple question might be the most meaningful
The importance of preparation in creating a hospitable space
Bring breath into the conversation
Learn to recognize and interrupt your own flow of self-full thought
Questions must be honed--they need to be written down and they require commitments to be made to them
And it is this final point that lingers with me. John Dewey believed that we figure out how to live better through experiments in living. To the extent that that is true of asking questions, then Great Asking is about how we experiment with questions. What are the practices of cultivating questions in our lives? Dewey also believed that democracy was the site of this experimentation. What are the sites of our experimentation in asking? These are questions I've been living for awhile and that will continue on--sustaining, departing from, and finding new practices; restless.
Living the questions
Sara and Krista's conversation was a gift. I want to leave you with a calling and, of course, questions. Sara asks of her students, "How would you respond to anything that I've just said." Krista advises, "Ask what the guest would be excited to answer."
So, learning from these Great Askers, how would you respond to anything I've just shared? What questions do you want to answer? What are you learning from this conversation?
Fall in love with the form of words that is the question. Love it in all of its fullness and majesty and inherent mystery. Love the way it privileges mystery. Give it a try and I’ll see you here next time.
https://onbeing.org/programs/living-the-questions/