"The Perfect Uselessness of Knowing the Answer to the Wrong Question"

In Ursula LeGuin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness the people of the planet Gethen have a tradition of predicting the future called Foretelling. Individuals selected to ask their question of the Foretellers only get one chance, so it's essential to be careful and thoughtful in framing the question. If not precisely asked, the answers will be in the vein of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, impossibly vague and open to interpretation. As far as we can tell as readers, no one ever gets a workable, straight-forward answer.

This, of course, is true of fortune-telling here on Earth as well. The "art form" of seeing the future, for those of us who do not believe, is easily seen as a practice of telling the questioner what they want to hear (or what they are inclined to believe) while keeping the answer doughy enough that whatever the future actually holds it can be shaped, in hindsight, into evidence of foresight.

Growing up, we asked one another, "If you could have any one superpower in real life, what would you choose?" As a kid, I fantasized about flying or great strength, but today I would seriously consider the ability to accurately predict the future. If nothing else, it would allow me to enrich myself by knowing exactly what stocks to buy. I couldn't go wrong. I would never again make a mistake.

In one of the key moments of the book, an envoy from another planet (who the locals misname as Henry) is asked, "You don't see yet, Henry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling? To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question . . . There is really only one question that can be answered, Henry, and we already know the answer . . . The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

As a species, we are doomed-blessed to experience life from a perspective that makes us believe in the "arrow of time," that our lives flow from one moment to the next. The math tells us (or at least tells physicists who can understand it) that the past, present, and future don't flow from one to another, but rather all exist simultaneously. We will never be able to see the future, however, because it exists for each of us, from our perspective, as a cloud of infinite possibilities. All we will ever be able to see with any clarity is the ever-emerging present.

LeGuin writes of "intolerable uncertainty," but absolute certainty would be equally intolerable. Knowing what comes next would squeeze every ounce of meaning from life as we know it. We would never learn anything because without questions, without doubt, without hope, without mistakes, there would be nothing to learn. And with nothing to learn, life would be impossible.

Our babies are born, to use LeGuin's terminology, "in the Center of Time." Only the present exists. This is what I find most awe-inspiring about working with young children. They already know the question and the answer. Even as our babies get older, when we allow ourselves to simply observe them at play (without giving in to the busybody urge to burden them with our fortuneteller's fears and hopes) we glimpse what it means to live in the universe as it is. Life itself will eventually bring them round, but for this short span the unsolvable mystery of "What's next?" is far less important than "What is?"

Schooling, as we tend to conceive of it, is really a kind of attempt at fortune-telling. In its most ideal form, we attempt to predict what knowledge and skills our children will need for their futures, then create curricula that we hope will deliver that knowledge and those skills. We are largely unconcerned with who or what they are right now, at the center of time, but rather who we foretell they will be. We try to motivate them with fears of "falling behind" or visions of glory and prosperity, telling them that if they behave this way or that way today, they will fulfill this or that prediction about tomorrow. 

We do it with the best of intentions. We want them to be happy. But as is the case with all fortune-telling what we mostly do is exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. There are, of course, exceptions, but far too many of us emerge from our decades of schooling no longer knowing how to live in the present. Instead we've learned to keep our eyes forward and our legs churning, racing into the future that may or may not be the one that was foretold.

When we allow children to play, when we allow people to direct their own learning, we give them the opportunity to embrace living at the center of time. This is a proper preparation for intolerable uncertainty, because it invites us to ask and answer our own questions, not because they prepare us for anything, but because we are curious, or even passionate, about the answers. 

The past informs us, of course, it tells the story of what we and the world have been. The future is a never-sated fantasy that, if we aren't careful, devours our present. It's only in the center of time that we discover how to flourish. And that, for me, is the only goal worth pursuing, to live the life we have today with passion and purpose, not because of where we're going, but because it makes us feel alive.

"Happiness," LeGuin writes in discussing her masterpiece, "has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."

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