Questions, Wonder, and Curiosity

Last week at an end-of-the-year class party, Lily received an award from her teacher for being most inquisitive in the class. She shook her teacher’s hand with a big smile on her face, then ran over to show me. A tiny clip art detective with a giant magnifying glass was smack in the middle of the page. “This is wonderful,” I told her.

I was having a moment of mommy pride. Other kids received awards for being fashionable or remembering every vacation they’ve ever been on. Some got awards for their big hearts or endless helpfulness. My kid got an award for asking questions, for being curious and probably annoyingly so. But she asks and wonders. She wants to know about what’s going on.

I can relate.

I have a clear memory of talking to my dad when I was about Lily’s age – maybe a little older – when he told me I asked too many questions. I didn’t realize that was a problem. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I just accepted things the way they were.”

I considered that, and thought maybe I should ask fewer question, at least of him. I tried, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to understand things – how things worked, why people did what they did, myself. My curiosity only grew as I got older and now I have a daughter who’s either picked it up in her DNA or (more likely) picked it up from my behavior.

I mean, I want my kids to have critical thinking skills. I want them to think independently and ask why before they do things. I want them to be curious about life and other people and themselves. I hope that someday when they go out into the world as adults, people find them interesting. I hope that someday, when I spend time with them as adults, I find them interesting.

The day school got out, I sat on the couch while Lily read me all of the personal narratives she’s written this spring. There are dozens. She’s prolific. Last week, we listened to the #Amwriting podcast and she told me she loves writing personal narratives much more than fiction. She’s just like her mama. (In fact, she told me she wants to be a baseball coach and a writer when she grows up, in addition to being a mom, of course.)

Lily read me story after story about the things we’ve done – going to the pottery festival where she got to throw a pot on a wheel, getting lost in the woods when I took Josh and her to a park we’d never been to, a playdate with her friend where she admitted she didn’t know how to use a Slip-n-Slide, getting her ears pierced for her birthday. These are the stories that make up her life. And most of them are stories that also make up mine.

I smiled as she read each one, thinking of the writing exercise in Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth where she suggests writing about a pivotal event from childhood. First write in the present-tense viewpoint of yourself as a child, she says. Be present. Write as if the event is actually happening. Then write it again from the past-tense viewpoint of yourself as an adult, someone who’s gained some perspective over the years, someone who’s learned something. Notice the differences, she says, and not just because of the wisdom we acquire from hindsight. Children see so differently from adults. It’s refreshing.

I think of how far we’ve come this school year, all the challenges we’ve faced, what we’ve rejoiced over. Life is equal parts astonishing and dull. Annie Dillard said it best: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. We spend it huddled in the trenches together, going out and coming back, trying this and that to see what fits, and making sure there’s a safe place to land. We ask questions, we wonder, we explore. That’s all I ever wanted as a kid; it’s all I want now.

I was young when I read The Writing Life. I hadn’t considered what Dillard said so well – that there’s writing and there’s life, the things we do and the lives we’re living. We need to be mindful of both.

Later in the book, she writes:

“Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

It hit me in the gut. I wrote it in a notebook and later put it in the sidebar of my blog. This idea of using it all up, giving everything, and believing that there will always be more and the supply will replenish itself – it was absolutely novel to me. It was in direct contradiction to what I’d been told as a child. Maybe I didn’t have to hold back and hoard everything that was good. Maybe I could ask my questions and wonder and be endlessly curious. 

I am writing the story of my life. I am, as Rilke says, learning to love the questions.

So, yes, let’s spend it all, even when we don’t know what’s next, even when our questions are unending and annoying and bigger than us, even when everything is pressing down and we can’t find our way out. Let’s give it all and believe something better is coming.