The Questions Children Ask That Adults Forgot to Ask

A six year old asked me last week whether the wind gets tired. Not why the wind blows. Whether it gets tired. I gave some answer about air pressure, and she waited politely for it to finish, and then asked again, softer, whether the wind gets tired. And I realized I had never once wondered, and that the question had been waiting for me my whole life. Adults collect answers. Children collect questions, and their questions have a structure our lost. They aim at the assumption, not the fact. Where does the floor end and the sky begin. Who named the days and did they check with everyone. Why is it my birthday but the cake is for sharing. These are not cute. These are audits. Every one of them is a grown-up question wearing a child's voice, and the reason we find them charming is that we find our own abandoned questions embarrassing. Here is my running list from a year of listening, with the damage each one does. Why do we say sorry before we say what for. This one broke my professional communication for a month, in a good way. Half the apologies I issue are procedure, not feeling, and the question exposed the order of operations. The feeling should come first. The child is right. If the map is old, is the place lying. A nine year old asked this about a hiking map, and the adults laughed, and then the hike proceeded and the trail had moved, and the map, it turned out, was the liar, and every map is a rumor about a place. I now trust maps a Politician's amount, which is to say, usefully and never totally. Do fish know they are wet. The classic, and the reason it survives is that it is secretly about us. What is the water we are in. What is so total that we cannot see it. Ask it about your industry, your language, your decade, and it stays fresh for years. It is the only question I know that is simultaneously a cliche and an unlimited research grant. Why does the vacuum scare the dog and the baby at the same time. This one looks like a joke and is actually about shared fear across species and sizes, about loud things that come toward you, and I have thought about it during more than one meeting. And the heaviest one, from a five year old, at a funeral, to nobody in particular. Where was he before he was born, because that place is also somewhere. The adults in the room had prepared answers about heaven and memory and grief. The child had found the actual symmetry, the one adults file under too hard and never revisit. Before and after, the two places we have all personally visited and cannot describe. What I have learned to do with these questions is refuse to convert them. The adult reflex is translation. The wind gets tired becomes a weather lesson. The funeral question becomes comfort. But the translation kills the asset. The question's value is its wrongness, its refusal of category. These days I try to just receive them, ask the child one question back, and write the originals down. The list is up to thirty one questions. It is the most valuable document I own that I did not write. Every entry was free, delivered by a person small enough to still see the floor as a proposal rather than a fact. The children are not asking cute questions. They are asking the questions we surrendered to be allowed in the room. Every so often one of them passes us the key back, and if we are not too busy, we take it.