Let it in | Luray, Virginia | Nov 2008

I grew up spending a tremendous amount of my time reading a wide range of books. Anything I could get my hand on, I devoured. I read day and night, and when I was wasn’t reading, I was thinking about what I had read, consolidating and creating bridges between islands of thoughts.

But I didn’t often share what was swimming in my head.

Throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, at both school and work, I spent my time reading, listening to people and storing up thoughts and ideas to dig into on my own. Instead of asking questions to people, I was content to listen and work it out on my own. I consumed, but I did not create.

Sometimes my questions just seemed so odd or tangential that I figured it was better not to slow down what everyone else was doing to get answers to my questions.

There was also a bit of me that wasn’t comfortable demonstrating my ignorance to a large group of people.

It wasn’t until far, far later than I realized that the questions I typically ask are very different from the questions most people ask.

Far from demonstrating my ignorance, it was more likely that my questions would have forced people to think about things in new ways. I used to keep my ideas to myself, content to work out new ways of thinking in my own head.

Now, I can’t sit still.

If you were to ask me what caused the switch, I’m not entirely sure I could tell you what happened.

Perhaps new mediums of public discourse made it easier for me. Perhaps I just gained confidence. Perhaps I just stopped caring about being wrong. But I also learned about the power of dumb questions.

I first realized this from a classmate and friend of mine. Far from a perfect person, he nevertheless had the gift of obviousness and the complete confidence to ask questions that most people simply wouldn’t ask in public. There’s a fine line between brilliance and stupidity, and he straddled the line daily.

Of course, not everyone appreciated the questions he asked: we naturally put our feet down to stamp out people that don’t fit in, that question the obvious, that don’t swim with the tide.

He didn’t care. At first I didn’t understand why he asked so many simple questions, but then I grew to learn that the questions he was asking didn’t always lead to such simple answers.

Now, instead of keeping seemingly dumb questions in my head, I ask. I still haven’t built all the bridges necessary to let all my ideas escape from my head in a way people would understand. But I’m working on it, a sort of non-stop construction of the mind, attempting to catch up to this new, grander world of freely available information and discourse.

I learned the best way to learn is to ask; people have great depths of knowledge, experiences and ideas in their heads, but we are not always sure how to express them.

What I do now is draw those ideas out. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I have a lot of questions. I listen, structure thoughts and help make the non-obvious obvious.

I’ve learned there’s a bit of brilliance in asking dumb questions.

My friend doesn’t know I learned this from him. But I will be eternally grateful to him for helping flip the switch in me.