Answers are Far Less Compelling than Questions

I recently ate a tomato salad that transported me back to my childhood, several years of which were spent in living with my family in a suburb of Athens, Greece. I was once again in the dappled shade of the dining area of a taverna set in a park. Children were racing around on the lawn in front of the graveled dining patio where my family had been served our first course. The tomato salad hadn't been my choice, but rather ordered for the table by my parents. I really only wanted souvlaki, but Mom insisted I try a bite of the classic tomato, cucumber, onion, basil, and feta combination that was to become the portal through which I travelled a half century back in time.

Food can be a portal to the past. For the novelist Marcel Proust the taste of a Madeleine that triggered his seven volume novel In Search of Lost Time (La Recherche). Art, music, scent, light, topics of conversation, photographs -- just about anything, in fact -- can, under the right circumstances, can take us back in time. Science fiction is full of stories of time travel, as if it's something yet to be invented, but the truth is that we do it all the time. 

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives," wrote English philosopher John Locke, one of most influential Enlightenment figures. He believed that life without memory would be "no life at all."

As a man of 62, I possess a much larger basket of memories than, say, a preschooler. It's what we call experience. The assumption is that we are wiser because we are older, which is to say, because we have a deeper well of memories from which to draw lessons that apply to (or make plans based on, or to raise cautions about) the present. It's assumed that we must always take the lead with young children because of this experience. But increasingly, I find myself uncomfortable the arrogance of this assumption. After all, I may have more memories than a five-year-old, but their memories are going to be much fresher, much more closely connected to what's happening right now. They don't have as far to travel as I do.

Besides, we've learned much more about how memory functions since John Locke's time. It's common knowledge that you can't change the past, but the truth is that we do it all the time. We now know that recalling memories, traveling into the past, changes those memories. The evidence even seems to indicate that the more often we recall a memory, the more inaccurate that memory becomes. Those science fiction time travelers are always cautioned to not do anything that changes the past while they are there because of how even the smallest alteration could cause dramatic changes to the present, but that's exactly what all of us do, change the past, whenever we find ourselves transported there.

We all have a literal blind spot at a point located between our eyes, but we perceive of the world in front of us as continuous because our brains create a bridge between what our left and right eyes see, based not on what is actually there, but rather what our brain expects to be there. We have a much larger blind spot behind our heads, but we know the world exists back there because of the story our brains tell about what ought to be there. When it comes to our memories, it's all a product of our brain's irrepressible drive to tell stories, not necessarily reflecting things as they were, but rather as they must have been. It's not the reliability or accuracy of those stories (our memories) that matters as much as how well they help us understand the world and our place in it in the present.

If we have any more wisdom than young children, therefore, is not necessarily contained in our memories themselves, but rather in our experience as creative storytellers about those memories. We are not scientists or reporters as much as we are mythologizers, explainers, tellers of tales that make sense to us, that give us comfort, that tell us the story of our identities and the ways of the world. We hope that our lessons, our example, will likewise offer sense and comfort to the children in our care, but we can never lose sight of the fact that we and our stories are the product of our unique perspective. That bit of the world between our eyes is different for everyone, just as our myths are a product of our individual uniqueness. 

My wife and I have been together since 1984, forty years, and have obviously many shared memories. We recently fought over one of those memories, each of us recalling things differently: what I think happened, she assures me, absolutely did not, yet I remember it so clearly. We will never know what really happened, nor does it matter. What matters is that the story I tell myself of this memory has already become something else, one that includes perspectives I never considered. Something that I thought old and settled has suddenly come alive once more.

I know that some are uncomfortable with thinking about the world in this way. They want certainty, they crave "objective" truth, they can only be satisfied with answers. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned through working with young children, however, is that answers are far less compelling than questions. When I watch children at play, when I stay out of their way with my "wisdom" and "experience" and "memories," I see humans in their natural state: pursuing their questions. Answers are ultimately dull things. They are questions that have been stripped of wonder. Questions without answers, in contrast, present life as it truly is: an experience of awe, where even the past is not even the past and where ideas and the stories we tell are everything.

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