Wondering

An Invitation to a potentially slow-rolling series

We all wonder 

Well. Do we really? 

And this is exactly how wondering goes. Right out of the gate, having intended to simply introduce what’s ahead, I’m already at my first wondering: 

Do we all wonder? 

I could go down the rabbit hole on this wondering. But here’s the thing, this is my writing, my first wondering foray, my prerogative. And so for this question, with stubborn intention, I’ll do literally no homework (a.k.a. the wondering that leads to research, research which proves something is true or not, research which in general I will always do, and cite, and also tell you if I haven’t, like I just did here). Today, I’ll deliver an opinion answer that says: 

Most of us are able to wonder, even if we aren’t inclined. 

If I err, I err on the side of hope. Because our ability to wonder is one of the greatest sources of hope for our own selves, our ability to be in community, our stewardship of the earth we inhabit.

So, yes. Let’s declare it. Most of us are able to wonder. We wonder. And this is the point from which I’ll begin. 

It’s not about Italian or Chinese Food

To be clear, I don’t mean this kind of wondering: 

• I wonder what to have for dinner? 

  or 

• I wonder what bee got in her undies? 

Though wondering of this sort has value, and wondering about dinner is one of my favorite things, what I’m referring to in this piece is the deep stuff. The wonder that allows the complicating Whoa into our thinking. The gray into our zebra. This wondering is allowing ourselves to noodle a question, a possibility, or even a firm opinion we haven’t questioned before. It’s a quiet, subversive, challenge. It’s a noodling whose outcome often takes us on a journey, shifts our lens, and may even lead to the rocking of our world.

Wondering, big wondering, can take us over and act in our life a bit like the ocean, some waves big, some floatable, each wave causing the next, and all of it larger than us in its power and scope. 

Of course, like entering the ocean, the caveat for us here is if we let ourselves. Active wondering is a choice.

Some personal examples

To illustrate what this wondering can look like, here are four quick recent examples from my own world of wondering. The important thing to notice is how they are not one-and-done questions and certainly have varying depth.

1. While reading the news, I wondered, Why is it that when innocent people are killed/hurt by society’s recognized leaders it’s called necessary (or at least it’s much less likely to elicit horror or sanctions) while when it’s done by unrecognized leaders it’s called terrorism? 

2. At a comedy club, my friend whispered that the comedian (Jessica Kirson, who’s bawdy-hilarious), “might ask you, what do you do.” And from there, until Kirson worked the whole front row and I was off the hook and relaxed, I watched myself panic quietly over this possibility and slowly feel more stiff and more basic and more boring and … I wondered, Am I these things? Am I becoming more of these things? What is going on for me right now? 

3. I read an article on Queen Latifa in The Guardian the Saturday I wrote this first draft. As it described her teen beginnings as a rapper, what permeated the story was the confidence with which she entered the world. The article didn’t unpack if she had doubts during this time (though that is a wondering sidebar, of course). What it portrayed was a strong, brave, talented young woman deciding to create and claim what was hers. Day after day, she got on that subway train and went in to make it so. And what I wondered was, What would I do, and what would my life be like, if I walked into the world with Queen Latifa's confidence? 

4. And after attending a reading for which I’ll be forever grateful, I wonder-launched, Why do so many White people talk to, and ask questions of, Ross Gay as if he only writes about joy?  

Anyway. Even as I write, right now, all four of these wonderings are here, moving big and small between conscious and unconscious noodling, because a real wondering does not end with a one thought-answer about the question. Instead, it creates ongoing waves that offer me the chance to consider, reenter, be shaped, changed, and moved.

Taking it home

So, if anyone’s head-scratching at this point, take the 

Do people wonder? 

wondering, and think of the directions it could go. 

From the personal: 

Do I wonder? (go ahead, ask yourself. Really. Ask yourself, do I wonder about things? And then) What sets me to wondering? How far do I follow it? What am I wondering about these days, and maybe even more, what am I not? What wondering threatens me? When does wondering shut me down? (Side note: wondering itself doesn’t actually shut us down; being afraid of what it asks us to consider is what causes us to shut down, a.k.a: plug our ears, shut our eyes, and run. But back to the personal wondering.). What wondering lights me up? Can I be threatened and still lit up? What is my wondering family of origin? What the heck is a wondering family of origin? (it means, did your family wonder?) Who taught me to wonder? Who taught me it was dangerous? Who encouraged/s me to talk about it and who discouraged/s me from doing the same? Am I honest about my wondering? Do I allow myself to be changed by it? 

And then there’s the more universal: 

What causes another person to wonder? What do other people wonder about? What was that person who just randomly flipped me off wondering about? What was that person in the car ahead who just randomly paid my toll wondering about? Are there people who don’t wonder? How many? What does thinking look like if a person’s thinking and imagination don’t hold wondering? Why does that happen? What happens when a person doesn't wonder? What happens to them? To society? To us? Are there things that pass for wondering but aren’t? Are there emotions that trigger or shut down wondering? What events encourage people to wonder and what does the opposite? Does the power structure around us not want us to wonder? Why?Do you wonder? And you? And you? And you? Does wondering cause us to glow?

Ok, that was a lot. Sorry not sorry.

Socrates at the bar

First of all, isn’t that kind of a fun idea? A woman walks into a bar… But I digress. Socrates said that “wondering is the beginning of wisdom.” Then he said, "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us." I think, mathematically, the sum of this is that wondering often shows us what we don’t know. Let’s change that w to a t. Wondering often shows us that we don’t know.

Ok, come sit down with me at this well-polished bar for a minute. Lemonade? Cider? Wine? Bourbon? I’m in Vermont: beer? Remember, we’re sitting at a bar, so let’s listen in to the people around us. It’s a little weird but that’s ok. I’m willing to bet that most of what we hear are opinions. Stories that are opinions and opinions that are opinions. Here’s one reason why:

Not knowing is not celebrated, practiced, or taught much in our culture. 

The other day, I had a long conversation with my mole cousin. We have matching moles above our lips that used to be called beauty marks and now need to be plucked. Life. I will not write a wondering about the migration of hair over time. Anyway. After I hung up, I reflected that I had asked very few questions and offered a lot of words. We’d been talking about education, teaching, crime, the environment, George Floyd, care of someone dying. Rich conversation, right? And yet, I hung up and felt unsettled. Feeling unsettled usually (always) means I’d better get busy wondering so I don’t instead get defensive and build a wall to make myself feel better. 

In my conversation with my mole cousin, there was so much to be wondered about, but because I cared about the topics and even had expertise in a few, I’d made statements rather than asked. As I reflected on my lack of questions (and she’s the one teaching in a charter school for Native students right now and the one who lives in Minneapolis St Paul, not me), I thought, oh. I realized some of my talking was ego, some was discomfort, maybe even fear. 

What I was left with was only the discomfort – both at myself and the things I avoided asking deepening questions about. I wondered. I realized. I need to get more out into the world. I’m starting to think I know the answers. (This can happen the further we get away from the action; this can happen the closer we get to the action.) I need to remember how to sit actively with the uncomfortable, the unknown. I need to be willing to explore. I wondered if, next time we talked, I’d do the same exact thing (talk) or manage to wonder aloud (a.k.a. ask questions) and then truly listen to what she offered. Then ask more rather than talk. Marinate in what I hear. I can hope.

Being willing to enter true wondering, a practice that shows us how little we know (even in areas where we know a lot), is a brave journey. Being open to the unknown - wondering - complexifies our life. This is because being open to the unknown, venturing in, and listening with our hearts, reveals new truths. New truths can make us get quiet at the bar. Sip without speaking. Speak without yelling. Listen. See. Look into one another’s eyes.

Wondering can cause us to understand things we never thought we would, question things we never thought we would, make us less right or self-righteous, give us compassion where we might not have had one iota of it before, show us we have no earthly idea about something we thought we held the Bible’s truth on. Wondering makes us sufferable again.

The unanswerable questions ala Toni Morrison

Although I suspect I’ve always wondered, I attribute my understanding and attempted practice of deep wondering to Toni Morrison.

I once heard Morrison speak in San Francisco. That night, I learned that the deepest version of wondering, as she said, is to ask the questions that have no answer. What she meant by this phrase (which I think she actually called asking the unanswerable questions, or else I called it that after hearing her, but - bare minimum - conceptually it was her, the great Toni Morrison, who gave me this practice) was that some wonderings don’t have any answer at all, or more often, don’t have one clear and final answer. They have multiple answers, and these answers can be as different from one another as dragon fruit and electric eels. And that’s ok.

And that night, right in front of us, she modeled what deep wondering into uncharted waters looks like. Warning, it is challenging wondering. You can do it.

Among other things, that night Toni Morrison talked about writing Beloved. She shared that what drove her into the unfolding of the novel, and Beloved’s world, was Morrion’s own personal grappling with an unanswerable question that arose from her research into slavery. Though this area of research was both an academic and personal passion for Morrison, she said, I did not want to write about slavery.

But then, as life happens, one day in her research she came upon a story she couldn’t walk away from. It was about an enslaved woman who’d run away with her very young children because they’d reached the age where they’d be sold.

As I remember the telling, this mother had spent her life living every horror of being enslaved. And so, when she realized her flight had not been successful and she was about to be caught, she killed her children rather than letting them be recaptured and forced into that same unending life. She looked into their beloved faces and said, No. 

And this was how the unanswerable question that, in part, drove Beloved was born. 

What she did, was it wrong? Toni Morrison asked us. 

And from the shore where we universally cry out, It’s always wrong to kill your children!!, the shore where I cry that myself, she took us into the ocean with wondering.

What would you do if your children were about to be forever trapped in a life you knew had no hope of changing? Could you look in your four-year-old daughter’s face and let her go, knowing she’d be sold off tomorrow, sent down-river alone never to see any of you again, and not too much later become the victim of frequent rape at the hands of her captors, worked to the bone, beaten, forced to take a husband, watch him sold, bred for children, then have them stripped from her hands and sold just as she was from yours? 

Could you so easily hand your children over to a life where they’d be punished and probably killed if they attempted to rise from it? If you had learned there was no hope of escape from this life, and your only try for it had just failed, what would you do, as the hunt for you closed in, when you looked in your children’s eyes?

If anyone’s memory or understanding of enslavement has been harmonized (a.k.a. whitewashed, a.k.a. what is actually happening in some parts of this country right now where modern day children are being taught a revised history that being enslaved was good for Black people, OH MY GOD) and so this remains a difficult question, first, come on (and wonder, deeply, why would someone choose to teach this falsehood?), then try this. Ask the same question using any modern context, where children are currently destined to suffer a horrific life and die a horrific death. These situations are not hard to find. 

If you knew the extent of your child’s suffering, and knew that it would only end with their death, how far would you allow it to go?

Morrison wasn’t asking us to go from no to yes. She wasn’t asking for a hard and fast answer. Instead, she was asking us to imagine. To inhabit. To wonder. 

Swimming in the big ocean is a real thing. It’s full body and mind. The ocean Morrison invited us into that night was the one where we braved swimming the large, dangerous, socially-stigmatized waves of right and wrong. The kind of waves we’re told never to enter. The kind of waves that feel existentially life-threatening. Where we might go to hell just for wondering. (Balderdash, by the way) The kind where we can’t sugar coat a really bad situation to make ourselves feel better. In essence, she asked us to consider these three questions:

What does it mean to save? 

What does it mean to protect? 

What does it mean to love?

To make the ocean real, she invited us to slip into an individual mother’s shoes. And consider. This mother was not only about to lose her babies, she knew what she would be handing them over to. What would happen to them. So (now feel the waves move under and around us), for this mother, which choice of what it means to love was more true? For this mother, as she hid in an abandoned shack and heard the hounds and whips and chains and guns and fists draw close, which choice was the greater giving, the greater sacrifice of the heart? 

I honestly don’t know how much of what I just wrote Toni Morrison said that night, versus how much I thought of later. But, before that night, there’d been no gray in my zebra regarding a question like this. The questions she offered changed me. They became my own wondering over the years, as my learning unfolded, and as I took walks, turning the unthinkable right side up and upside down thanks to her words. Could I understand? Actually, I could. Did it mean I would do the same? I had no idea what I would do. But I understood. And if I could understand, what did that mean? 

Even for those of us who still cannot possibly imagine the act this mother chose, and in whose minds there’s only one correct answer, perhaps wondering into her circumstance and experiences will make what she chose to do an act we can come a step closer to understanding?

That is the point.

To understand does not mean to affirm or to condemn. It’s simply a crack in the armor that lets the light in.

Beloved is a brave book. And so was Toni Morrison’s willingness to wonder publicly about two socially stigmatized acts - a mother who kills her children and the subsequent wondering about the rightness and wrongness of that choice, even about what mother love is. Through Morrison’s willingness to step into forbidden wondering territory right there in front of all of us, she not only modeled the bravery of entertaining the unanswerable questions, but she lived for me the compassion that’s part of allowing oneself to step into the gray – those middle area of truth that exist between what we so often declare to be the rights and wrongs of life.

For me, that night in the packed auditorium in San Francisco, Morrison’s articulation of the unanswerable question became an alive concept that has ever since informed and enriched and complicated my life in ways that indebt me to her brave heart. She helped me learn how to truly wonder.

Don’t be afraid

Please don’t be afraid. Or, better said, please don’t be stopped by fear. Because though our true wonderings are often born from unanswerable questions, THEY’RE NOT ALWAYS THIS NEXT-LEVEL HARD ON THE HEART. 

Just the same, to truly wonder is to be willing to get our hands dirty (can I have both an ocean and a garden metaphor in the same piece?). Because if we think of each wondering as a garden, its everprobing roots and far-reaching branches will give us the best image for what real wondering looks like. It keeps growing. It touches other things. It needs them. 

And then, with them, it produces new life.

Been there done that

Back to the what causes people to not wonder wondering. What stops our wondering? Maybe, when we don’t wonder, or intentionally close our ears and eyes to wonder, it’s because we get scared of not knowing, or of learning something that’s the opposite of what we’ve been so sure of in the past. That was partly true, I think, in my conversation with my cousin. I wanted to be someone who KNEW about teaching. What I knew and what she was sharing didn’t go together, and I wanted to know that things would be ok. I talked because I didn’t let myself be uncomfortable in what was perhaps some unanswerable questions, or at least were challenging realities.

So, not wondering may stem from our fear of feeling hard things or facing new truths that require our courage. A wondering: what would I be afraid to learn? What mistake of mine would I be afraid to discover? Where do I feel an internal uncomfortable response if I begin to wonder? We can be so afraid – to face ourselves, the people we love, our groups, the world, and especially to let any of these be wrong – that our fear can stop us in our tracks.

I have a friend whose brother adamantly doesn’t believe in climate change. He refuses to engage in conversation (wondering) about it. His explanation for this is that scientists are human beings and so are biased - and because they’re biased, he doesn’t have to listen to them, let alone consider their uncomfortable conclusions. 

Truth is, if he ever listened and wondered, the ground he has forced firm under his feet would shake. And this he does not want. This he will not risk.

I have (so many times) heard the phrases, I don’t need to read/watch that. I’ve already watched the hard stuff, I don’t need to watch more. Life has already been so hard, I can’t take any more. Or, Been there done that, one of the greatest dismissals of all. 

If there is one thing I wish (and that’s a lie, I’m sure there are others), it would be that no one ever said any of these sentences ever, ever again. 

It’s hiding

Sentences like these? What is their harm? In each case, when we say it, we’ve decided (whether we realize it or not) to quit feeling the pain of others. Which means we’re done considering the possibility of the pain of others. Which means, we’re declaring our heart closed, unwilling to be opened. We have latched shut and locked our picket fence to stay safe and comfortable inside our tiny manufactured world. We have closed our eyes to seeing. We refuse to look beyond our gate.

When we close to wondering, we choose to live in a small, increasingly darkening space. No matter how we market ourselves as good people, no matter our good works, the truth is, in this protected space, we grow small and must remove ourselves more and more from the world in order to continue to protect our safety. We become super boring. But we don’t only become boring. We become dangerous. Because we are forced to protect our fences.

But Amy, the magic happens in the spaces

“What history has shown is that when you are granted a perspective bigger than the one you had been harboring, you end up thinking differently about the world. For the better.” Neil deGrasse Tyson.

My teacher of how to teach creative writing, the wonderful human and poet, Toni Mirosevich, gave other language to this. Part way through the semester, she put down a big honking syllabus I’d created and took a gentle breath. This looks great, she said, kindly. And Amy, it’s important to remember that the magic happens in the spaces.  

Like oceans, true wonderings need big space to unfold. Like gardens, wonderings need enough space to grow. Entered, these spaces take us places we haven’t yet considered.

These journeys may frighten us. I think there’s often a conscious/unconscious fear that what our wondering reveals will kill us, or kill something we love. But the opposite is true. What’s real cannot be killed. It can be changed, but it will live.

It’s the hiding that will drown us. Jung said that when we hide from our dark side, our dark side will ultimately power us. Our dark side is anything in us that keeps us from real Love. Stuffing away a wondering because it makes us afraid feeds our dark side. It forces us to focus energy (conscious or unconscious) on keeping our dark side hidden. That energy looks like loose rage, fear, blame, denial. Probably all the seven deadlies. And, what a waste of the human spirit those things are.

Two truths:

Nothing we choose to face honestly can kill us.

And, when we wonder, it’s for a reason. 

And so, my hope

This series is me leaning into my own wonderings, but I’m not doing it merely as a personal wondering-jerk. Don’t get me wrong, I am picking things that interest me to write into. When I write about the value of a purring cat, for that, well, I am all about that. Or how we center and restore ourselves in really hard times, well, that, too. Selfishly, I hope that these wonderings open me more and more. Send me into the world asking more questions and listening around me differently and more deeply. Make me more whole.

Would I have reflected as I did on my conversation with my mole cousin if I wasn’t working on this project? I hope so, but I’m not sure. Would I have revisited the imagining into what it’d be like to enter my life with Queen Latifa confidence? I hope so but who knows? So, this project is for me, yes it is. 

But I’m also exploring these wonderings on ‘paper’ in the hopes that my own questions may whisper over the picket fence into spaces beyond my own small garden, to connect us, and perhaps even spark a wondering or two that, person by person, expands far beyond my own ability, bringing more light through more cracks and lighting up a world that right now feels like it’s fighting for its very heart. 

Experts say our world is experiencing a loneliness epidemic – to the point that some countries have created Ministers of Loneliness. It’s our fences that stop our connection. They stop community. They don’t allow the touch that lets us thrive. 

Mother Earth/God/Spirit/Allah/Source/Jaweh/the Universe/your name for Love did not construct these fences. We folks put them up; so it’s up to us to take them down.

If I put on my Queen Latifa confidence pants and admit it here, this is what I truly hope: I hope these wonderings spark even a small dismantling of what divides us. Fear, the unwillingness to listen, consider, look. I hope that the process of wondering together and apart invites us to see past our own individual fences. And reconsider them. And maybe also laugh in the process. Laughing is so good, in both the ocean and the garden.

Finally, I have to do this. I cannot let go of whatever small things I can do in love for this earth and its people. If I err, I err on the side of hope. Because our ability to wonder is one of the greatest sources of hope for our own selves, our ability to be in community, our stewardship of the earth we inhabit. And I wonder, what happens when we stop allowing ourselves to hope? That particular ocean is terrifying. That garden dies. So. Let’s just not stop hoping.

Today, I invite you to join me in this journey of wondering. And, as always, I invite you to do it in a spirit of kindness. I’ll be back with the first question in a few weeks!

---

Sources:

Socrates

Socrates

Tyson

Art by MJordanPayne