What Did You Ask Today?
Rabbi Nilton Bonder tells a story about Isido Rabi, the 1944 Nobel Prize
winner in physics. When he was interviewed about his achievements, he said he
owed it all to his mother. "When we got out of school, all the mothers
would ask their children what they had learned that day. My mother would inquire
instead, 'What did you ask today in class?'"
I, too, was encouraged as a
child to ask questions. My parents were lifelong learners and modeled what it
meant to be curious about something and then go about finding out more
information about it. My father was a doctor with a great love of
knowledge. Many evenings after dinner, he'd go to the family room and pick up a
volume of the
World Book Encyclopedia, open it to a page, and start
reading. After a while, he'd look up and say, "Here's something interesting." I
soon concluded from these random discoveries that pretty much everything was
interesting to him.
Several segments in the New Morning show on "
The Right
Questions" focused on asking questions in relationships. This process is a
more complicated than reading the encyclopedia. The answers will vary person by
person and from one time to the next. To me, this says that the
questions need to be what Quaker educator Parker Palmer (
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life)
calls "honest, open questions." They are the kind you cannot ask while thinking,
"I know the right answer to this and I sure hope you give it to me." These
questions can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." They encourage someone
to explore as they are answering what they really think and believe.
Harriette Cole suggested some especially good questions for a
potential mate, but really, you could use them with almost anyone. "When you
were growing up, when you got in trouble, what did you get in trouble for?" This
tells you something about the values taught in someone's home. An open
honest follow-up question might be: "What would get you in trouble today?" Or
how about, "What does the word trouble mean to you?"
I think the key to
this process is to ask questions without any expectation of what is an
acceptable answer, i.e., without judgment. Unlike my father's encyclopedia
inquiries, these questions are not about satisfying my curiosity; they are about
deepening my understanding of another person and even, perhaps, that person's
understanding of him- or herself.