How to Wonder
It's hard to know where to even start, so I'll visit a question from the last post, and keep doing that until I run out of questions or die of old age.
In the last post, I mentioned my favorite chapter of my favorite book. The name of the chapter is How to Wonder like Socrates. I very nearly plagiarized the name of the chapter until I had the insight of putting part of it in the subtitle, problem solved.
What does it mean to wonder? I still don't own a dictionary, but I'm guessing it says something like "to ask questions." People write a lot of glowing things about curiosity, and yet it is never overstated. Many creatures have a curious spirit. Its danger to cats is legendary. Dogs can be very curious about what you are eating. I’ll leave it as an exercise to you, dear reader, to think of another example. I’ve left the comments open on this one so that you may share.
In this chapter, Eric Weiner explores the concept of experiencing questions. He relates a conversation with another philosopher, Jacob Needleman, that introduced the idea to him.
"Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions."
As a programmer, I can tell you where my mind went— hacks and quick fixes. Fix the exception or just catch it and output to the log. Use a library, even if you think your own solution would be a better fit and not too difficult to write. Of course, that is how projects get finished. So they tell me. If I ever finish a project, I will let you know.1
I've learned that life is sublime when we take our time on the question part. We can enjoy the state of not knowing. Let everyone around you know that you do not, in fact, know. They may sigh, as I often experience. Or if they are a certain kind of soul, they may wish to shake your hand. 🤝 It's enough, for now, this is the way.
In therapy, it might be a little different. Many therapies these days are what they call solutions focused and designed to wrap up in just a handful of sessions. You don’t always have to understand how you got somewhere to understand where you need to go. This is generally good, therapy is not an infinite resource, and if something is troubling you right now then finding a solution sooner rather than later is just compassionate. Sometimes a mindhack is exactly what you need. All that being said, when personal insights can be uncovered in therapy, it can be life changing.
It is interesting that Weiner calls Socrates the original therapist. You know when I said that therapy is a limited resource? I was lying. Friends create the perfect space to experience these questions— longtime friends and the kind you just met at the bar or cafe or bowling alley. Maybe the bar in the bowling alley.
Why do we rush to solutions? For one thing, knowing the right answer at the right time is sexy and cool. But let’s look deeper. Humans have a highly evolved discomfort avoidance system— the envy of our part of the galaxy, so I’ve heard— and to have a question without an answer can indeed be uncomfortable. Maybe we would like to rule out one possible answer that keeps us up at night. So we avoid that feeling as much as possible by finding the answer as quickly as possible.
And here is a weird bug in our source code: avoiding something or rushing away from something, even something small, tends to make it bigger in our minds compared to when we turn around and face it. As we dodge and run, it just gets bigger and bigger, like a video game boss with sneaky mechanics. It becomes habit forming, and the relief we find through avoidance becomes greater and greater, until you can't even imagine yourself doing the thing.
Living with uncertainty can be like that, start out mildly uncomfortable and then grow after we always avoid it. If we finally let ourselves be in the same space as uncertainty without trying to escape, we tend to find it less scary than we imagined. We might even feel silly about all the effort to get away.
To be fair, sometimes uncertainty is legitimately scary. But I think we treat it that way far more often then we need to. The fear of experiencing death, for example. They sometimes say, "life is fragile." In some sense, that's not really true, life can be remarkably robust. I've learned that the hard way. I’m going to take a wild guess, the average years to expiration for someone reading this post? Fourty. In any case, plenty of time to rewatch Star Trek: TNG.
But it will happen, and then what happens? I've always thought of it like turning out the lights and I immediately fall asleep. Maybe I don’t dream. Maybe I have one last dream that only lasts a moment. Maybe it seems to last forever. It is the Occam's razor version of the afterlife.
Of course, there are other explanations that involve very beautiful places or very hot places. Or some kind of transformation. These are all fascinating to think about, and perhaps that is how you might experience the question yourself. I just think, whatever we believe, it shouldn't make us more afraid than Occam would have it.
Questions are a great alternative to opinions and fill the same void. A favorite part of the chapter:
“A philosopher says to his opinions, ‘You are my opinions. How did you get in here? You didn’t ask me. I didn’t examine you. Yet I believe you. You’re taking over my life.’ ”
I think of my opinions and how they colonize my mind. Like all wily colonizers, they trick me into believing I invited them. Did I? Or did they show up unannounced, these ideas of others, and dress themselves in my clothing?
Asking questions. Socrates was the king of it— to the degree that they named a whole method of dialog after him which is basically just asking questions. So let's ask questions. Not just ask, 🤙 experience. 👈️
Weiner introduces a new kind of greeting: "Take your time." If that's where the Socrates Express takes us, I’m on board.
This seems like late in the post to talk about the other meaning of wonder— to hold awe. It's how we respond to something wonderful. But really we were talking about that the whole time.
Here is what I try to remember each day: Start at the beginning. Find comfort with uncertainty. Enjoy your stroll toward truth,2 hope that you do not arrive too soon. Arrive, when you must, at answers of the heart.
If you ever watch me while I’m programming, there’s an easy way to tell if I’m having fun: Am I in a hurry?
If you are like me, you sometimes get "wander" and "wonder" mixed up. They look too much alike and sound too much alike and are conceptually too similar. Am I more like a wondering wanderer or a wandering wonderer? See, now we are both mixed up.