Asking the Next Question by Jim Checkley

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Asking the Next Question by Jim Checkley

I have always been a big science fiction fan. I even wrote and published some short stories way back in the dark ages of the 1970s when I lived up in New Jersey and was attending school at Montclair State College. I was, I think, in my last year at Montclair State when a friend of mine from school named Karl asked me if I wanted to go to a big science fiction and fantasy convention up in Great Gorge, New Jersey, a ski resort in the Pocono Mountains. I loved going to science fiction conventions and this one looked fantastic with lots of big name writers, a terrific program, and a fantastic dealers’ room. This science fiction convention had it all. And what was more, it was going to be held at the Playboy Club. What better place for a science fiction and fantasy convention?

Anyway, I told Karl that it would be great to go to the convention. So we made arrangements to drive up together and waited for the big day.

It was the middle of winter, back when we still had winter, and the night before the convention, it snowed something like three feet. I’m not kidding. The drifts were up over the parked cars on my street. But, I was a really big science fiction and fantasy fan, so I dug out my car and drove up to the college to meet Karl. I didn’t for one second doubt that Karl would be there, and so I was not surprised when he was—although his was the only car in sight. He, however, had been a little more practical than me and had called ahead to the Playboy Club to see if the convention was still going to be held. And, of course, it was or he would not have been there.

It was still snowing a little and standing there in the snow drifts, we had a momentary lapse of faith, but then decided, what the heck, what’s the worst thing that could happen—we fall off a mountain road in a blizzard. But we are all immortal when we are young, so away we went—driving, I might add, a Ford Pinto.

When we arrived at the convention, the place was deserted. I mean, there was nobody around. But we went into the club—it was very impressive—and found our way to the auditoriums where the main events of the convention were to take place. When we went inside we saw no more than a dozen fans and a handful of science fiction writers sitting around in conversation. Most of the people present had come in the night before and had stayed in the resort hotels. I think Karl and I were the only lunatics who had driven all the way up from the suburbs of New York City.

Anyway, the organizers saw no point to actually conducting the program—many of the guests of honor hadn’t arrived in any event. So, we spent the day hanging out in the mostly empty club, talking about science fiction, fantasy, and whatever else was of interest.

That was one of my favorite days ever. Yes, I was a geek, and on that day I was one very happy geek. Imagine being 21 years old and spending a day with a group of famous science fiction writers and some kindred spirits at a Playboy Club.

And this is how I met Theodore Sturgeon. How many of you know who Theodore Sturgeon was? Theodore Sturgeon was one of the great science fiction writers of the Golden Age of science fiction. His most famous novel is “More Than Human,” which won many awards, and he wrote two of my more favorite Star Trek episodes from the original series, “Amok Time” and “Shore Leave.”

But on this day, we spent hours talking, had lunch together—and yes, we had several bunnies as our waitresses (the first and only time that ever happened to me)—and we got to know each other pretty well. At some point in the afternoon, he signed the books I had brought up with me and in the process introduced me to his personal symbol that over the years I have taken on as my own. You see, Theodore Sturgeon signed all his books with his name and then he added a capital Q with an arrow going through it. Here’s what it looked like:

He asked me if I knew what that meant. I said I did not. He then said, “It means, ‘ask the next question.’ Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. And never stop asking questions.”

I immediately loved this symbol and what it stood for. After the convention, I asked a friend who was an art major to make me a stylized Q with an arrow going through it and I kept it framed on my desk for decades. I have tried to live my life in accordance with the attitude and vision engendered by always being ready and willing to ask the next question and being prepared to accept the answers wherever they may lead. That hasn’t always been easy, and there is more to it, actually, than meets the eye.

Asking the next question probably seems to you to be a natural state of affairs. After all, you—we—are Unitarian Universalists. But asking the next question is not a universally embraced attitude about life. There is a distinction between simply asking questions, which is a natural part of being human, and asking the next question. I don’t think that asking the next question, and the question after that, is actually an inherent part of being human. This is because, and this does make a difference, what most people want is answers. We hate uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. Human beings want answers so much that we will make them up if we need to—everything from the great myths that explain the world and our place in it, to the guy who says, “I don’t know,” but then gives you an answer anyway. And once people have those answers, and find them psychologically satisfying, they tend to stop looking.

You see, Unitarians always seem to be on the search for truth. And when you are searching, it makes sense to ask questions. But what happens when you have found the truth? The natural tendency is to accept what you’ve found, stop asking questions, and settle into a comfortable and satisfying place. Once you have found the truth, people who are still looking, who are still questioning, have a tendency to annoy you. So—on the bright side—we can all take some solace that we might annoy them as much as they annoy us. Be that as it may, however, once you’ve gotten to a place where you are satisfied, it’s entirely too easy to stop questioning.

And that attitude is understandable. I get it. We all get into our comfort zones with what we know and believe and we want to stay there. Having certainty, having answers, provides that comfort and lets us relax in a world that is terribly uncertain and is becoming more so all the time.

Many years ago, I had a secretary who would always interrupt me when we were talking about controversial issues such as evolution, global warming, or abortion. She’d tell me that she had her beliefs, that she was satisfied with them, and she was not interested in questioning them. She was saying, “Just leave me alone.”

The attitude displayed by my secretary can actually be kicked up a notch or two to the point where there is an active ban on asking questions. If you think about the way human beings lived for many centuries in Europe, free inquiry into the way the world worked, how to best live life, and so many other questions that confronted people was not just discouraged, it was punished. Thus, for a long time people were told that all they needed to know was Aristotle and the Bible and any deviation from that script was not just a sin, it was a crime.

This sort of attitude is still with us today, of course. The most obvious examples are the fundamentalists of Christianity, Islam, and other religions. But there’s more to it than that. At a mundane level, how often do we hear somebody say “TMI” meaning they are getting too much information about an uncomfortable or embarrassing subject and they want the speaker to stop? That’s a trivial thing, I admit, but TMI isn’t limited just to colonoscopies and locker room stories. TMI is symbolic of a strong current in our society that discourages inquiry into certain matters and areas of life. From the Frankenstein notion that there are things we simply were not meant to know, to the censorship and burning of books, a la Fahrenheit 451, to modern debates about recombinant DNA, stem cells, and cloning, there is a strong current of caution, indeed fear, about asking the next question and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, comfort, and our place in the world.

I, and I suspect many of you, reject these notions. You see, for me, asking the next question isn’t simply a matter of curiosity. For me, asking the next question is a way of life, it is an approach to the world and how we live in that world that for me is the only way to go.

Of course many—and I mean billions of people—have decided to live their lives and create their futures based on the authority of one of the mainstream religions, and in so doing accept as true and unchanging the values, laws, prescriptions, and choices found in sacred texts as interpreted by priests, rabbis, and mullahs. Those people have their framework of reality, their vision of life and how to live it, and they are done. They will each tell you sincerely and confidently that their accepted framework is the correct one, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or some other. Reason and logic tell us that all of them cannot possibly be correct—but that doesn’t seem to matter. After all, they will say they have faith.

Faith is supposed to provide answers, and with them, certainty. It’s a kind of forced certainty—although that’s rarely acknowledged—because people of faith simply choose to accept something as true—that’s the very definition of having faith—accepting as true those things that otherwise cannot be proved to be true. Faith works, of course, because, it provides a safe, certain, framework of reality, morality, right, and wrong that people can and do rely upon. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what kind of faith we are talking about. Whether it’s faith in one of the many religions or faith in a Twelve Step Program, that faith will provide a level of certainty, which will itself provide for the comfort, safety, and sense of place and belonging that people seem to require to feel at peace with themselves and their place in the world.

This reminds me of a study I read about years ago concerning young children and how they respond to their environment. It turns out that if you provide a child with firm and certain boundaries, that child will actually venture out farther in exploring his or her environment than one that has been given total freedom to do as he or she wishes. This may seem counter-intuitive, but there is an explanation that makes sense to me.

The first child—the one with the boundaries and the framework—comes from a place of comfort and familiarity, a place of safety and certainty, which provides it with the confidence and ability to take some risks and venture out a little into the world knowing that if something happens, he or she can always come back to a known and safe place. The second child, the one with complete freedom, however, has no such certainty or safety and experiences what an adult might think of as unlimited free choice as a frightening chaos. That child must always decide for him or herself what is safe and unsafe, what is good or bad, and how far to go before going too far. This tends to make most children more cautious and anxious about things and as a result, they tend to hold back more. What applies to children also applies to adults.

Now everybody, whether they have traditional religious faith or not, everybody has a view of the world and their place in it. I have one, Hillary has one, we all have one. That view of the world is one that we trust, that we act upon, and gives to us the same thing that boundaries gave to the young children: a sense of comfort, place, and security in the world. And if we are asking the next question, then we are challenging that view on an almost daily basis, something I think is really difficult to do, but is also necessary.

In this respect, asking the next question symbolizes to me living the responsible, conscious, and intentional life. It is a life with as much responsibility as freedom and a life marked by having the courage and the will to confront, accept, and address the important questions that challenge us both as individuals and communities.

Asking the next question is not so much doubting as it is realizing that most knowledge and most truths are incomplete or inadequate to deal with every situation, especially in our incredibly complex and every changing modern world. Yes, it is important to believe in something, to be invested in each of our world views to the point where we trust and act upon them, but it is also important to know that they could be wrong and that we may need to change our minds, and, in the process, change ourselves. Said another way, not only should you not believe everything you hear, but you must be prepared on a moment’s notice to not believe everything you think.

This is the key to it then: If we create a framework of life that is full of certainty, full of absolute answers, whether from god or from science or some other place, then we will become stuck, we will not grow, will not evolve, will not expand. There may be some comfort there, perhaps even a lot of comfort, but to me it is a sterile, cold, and lifeless place to be. On the other hand, if we choose not to believe anything, if we choose not to invest ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually in a vision of what life should be, and constantly doubt ourselves and our understanding, then we end up in a shallow place, a place of impermanence, of total ambiguity, with little comfort, little to rely upon, little safety, and little fun. We must somehow be totally committed to our view of life today, but be willing to change tomorrow.

We are creating ourselves and our futures every day. This requires us to act consciously and with intentionality. That’s difficult to do for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we have to actually pay attention and steer ourselves and our lives rather than simply letting ourselves follow the path of least resistance or some preordained path chosen by others or the path that our brains urge us to take as a result of evolution and our desire for comfort, certainty, and security.

In this regard, asking the next question is a symbol of our ability to rise above the animals that we are, that jumble of instincts, desires, fears, and other programs that evolution has provided to human beings for our survival. Those programs have worked remarkably well and we have not only survived, we have thrived. But now it’s time to change. Those survival techniques, including our incredible propensity for violence and war, as well as our ability to hate and denigrate based on irrational or meaningless distinctions, those tendencies simply are not serving us well any more and we need to do all in our power to lose them, both personally and as communities and nations.

Our ancient myths and mainstream religions contain the strong notion that humans were created by God at the top of the pyramid of life, that God has given people dominion over the Earth, and therefore, whatever we do is OK. This is a dangerous attitude, and one that needs to be lost, along with so much else from our old myths and religions. We need to instead accept that we are a natural part of the natural world, on a par with all life, and that for better or worse, we are the stewards of this planet and need to husband our resources and our home rather than believing that we have permission from God to do whatever we want.

There are two photographs that have been taken in the last 40 years that symbolize for me the new horizons and understandings that we all need to incorporate into our vision of the world and our place in it. The first was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by the astronauts in the Apollo VIII spacecraft as it orbited around the moon. They turned their TV camera back on the Earth and for the first time in history, the people of Earth saw their home as a small cloud covered globe hanging in space—a jewel in an infinite ocean of black. That picture taught us in an instant that we are all one on this world, our only world, a tiny, fragile world, for which we, and we alone on this planet, are the caretakers.

There was no crystal dome over the Earth separating our world from heaven, as those who wrote the Bible believed; there was no heaven in the blackness of the total vacuum of space. On hundreds of millions of television screens around the globe all that the people saw was a fragile and altogether tiny world, a world put into perspective by the second photograph, I mentioned. Called the Hubble Deep Field, this photograph taken a few years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope and it provides the deepest, most awesome view of the sky ever recorded. The Hubble Deep Field revealed thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars existing in an area of the sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arms length. The poet William Blake challenged us to imagine the world in a grain of sand: well here are trillions of them—an image so vast it is literally incomprehensible.

When the Apollo VIII astronauts read from the Book of Genesis on that Christmas Eve, it marked for me an important transition, a transition from the old myths, the old comforts, and the incredibly self-centered vision of humans and our planet, to the new vision with its very different place for us in the world, a natural place that was nonetheless fraught with responsibility and will require us to fearlessly, fairly, and honestly confront our future and the future of every living thing on this planet. But my youthful optimism has not been vindicated—at least not yet. I am a part of this church community and do these services in large part because I think that this transition—from the old myths to the new reality—is possibly the most important intellectual and spiritual transition a person can undergo and it is going to take lots of us to change the world.

And that, ultimately, is what asking the next question is about. It is about changing ourselves, our communities, and our world to make a better life for everyone. But before we can make changes, whether they are to ourselves as individuals or our communities, we need to be able to envision those changes and then make them so. To do this we must first and foremost change ourselves.

I therefore agree wholeheartedly with the notion of self-work and trying to make ourselves better than we are and to increase our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the world. In that sense, I am a firm believer in what is called positive psychology. Most psychology you hear about is concerned with “fixing” something, be it a phobia, a neurosis, or some other metal ailment. But there is so much more possible in evolving and becoming a better, more understanding, more complete human being than just correcting problems. Positive psychology is about finding ways for us to grow, to become more than we are, and to simply be better people. And one need not be lying on a couch for positive psychology to be a force in one’s life: it can and does happen in the pews of this and other, kindred, churches and many other places as well.

I will conclude by noting that virtually all choices we make about how to live our lives, and what provides meaning and purpose, are uncertain in the sense that we cannot be sure that this path or that path will lead to the best result or have any meaning except to ourselves. There are no certain paths to specific outcomes like happiness, success, meaning and purpose. There is only our own path and the courage to go down it.

My path has been the path of asking the next question, and the question after that, and never stop asking questions. I am grateful to Theodore Sturgeon for introducing me to his Q with an arrow going through it on that snowy winter day so long ago. I chose that path, and it has made all the difference.

Presented June 24, 2007

First Unitarian Universalist Church

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print