The Big Book of Why

There is an art to asking questions. I knew it well when I was a kid.

"Mommy, why is the sky blue?"

"Daddy, what are the dogs doing?"

"Random stranger I just met, why do you smell funny?"

I mean the questions never stopped.  It's a miracle I ever even made it into the public education system. It's a wonder my parents didn't strangle me first. They even bought me a book once to try and shut me up. I mean they bought me a lot of books. I loved to read. But this particular book was titled something like "The Big Book of Why?"

I didn't like it. I didn't like the answers it gave because they were too long and scientific. I've always been more of a fiction girl myself. When it came to cold, hard facts and answers, I wanted someone to explain it to me. I wanted someone to sit down and draw me pictures, engage my interest and entertain me.

I'll clarify too that entertainment and television are not always synonymous. Sure it captured my attention for a little while. The scientist with the crazy hair and goggles was good for a laugh, but none of it stuck. It was interesting but it wasn't enough.

 The answers that science gave were never what I wanted them to be. They were always too cut and dry and matter of fact. I wanted the sky to be blue for some other reason than atmosphere and all that scientific mumbo jumbo. I wanted the sky to be blue because the Smurfs painted it that color or because blue was the sky's favorite color or because the sky's grandmother knitted it this nice, soft blue blanket and the sky didn't want to lose it so it wore it all the time.

Asking questions was more gratifying than having a television or a book just tell me answers I hadn't asked. If you asked different people then you always got different answers and your understanding was always growing and changing.

?????

I don't know exactly when I stopped asking questions, but I'd be willing to bet it was very closely related to the day I learned what straight A's were. That day learning became a game of who can get the highest score instead of who can actually obtain the most knowledge. That was probably the very day I stopped asking questions.

In my little brain it only made sense that if you had questions it meant you didn’t know something. And if you didn’t know something it meant you weren’t smart. I wanted to be smart. I wanted to make my parents proud and to win the competition that was the public school grading system.

Thus began the legacy of forgetting how to learn, of forgetting how to ask questions and be curious. I soaked up, like a sponge, everything the teacher said. If I didn't get something I went home and I figured it out, by myself, in secret, enough to get by. And I am an intelligent girl. Enough to get by, really was better than that. It was enough to "succeed" even.

But the question remains…Did I really LEARN anything?

Of course I have to give credit where credit is due. I did have a hand-full of teachers who were truly teachers. They didn't just spoon-feed answers to unasked questions. They made us work for those answers. Every now and then there was a teacher who sparked my imagination and who got me thinking. Wondering. But I let my laziness get the best of me a little too easily sometimes. Sometimes it was just easier to study for the test and get the A, than to take the effort to learn.

*****

So now I'm out of school. Learning should be irrelevant now, right? I got the straight A’s in college. I earned the degree that essentially says:

I, Sara LittleCloud Knight,

am a top notch test taker,

magnificent memorizer

and an overall brilliant bull-shitter.

I "learned" all I’ll ever need to know right? Unless I decide to go back to grad school. But let’s face it, the

root of my problem is not the lack of knowledge, but the loss of a skill I had once taken for granted.

I want to learn how to ask questions again. I want to learn how to learn again and how to use my imagination like I did when my best friend was a lizard and I slayed dragons in the woods behind the house. I want to learn how to see the sky for all that it is, instead of just blue.