A Soul Searched

Wisdom is seeking the suitable.

Granville D. Austin, The Thinkerer

Before you employ the services of the omniscient-seeming Google to pronounce your answer to the question above, I must admit mild subterfuge in the phrasing of my question. The trick lies in my use of the word “thing.” Once the query above is fed to a search engine, it spews forth a host of gigantic material entities for your consideration as worthy candidates for the title of “heaviest thing.” These material entities include:

While these things are inconceivably weighty, I would argue that all of them pale in comparison to the heaviest thing that human beings are called to carry—questions.

My argument is simple: the question: “Should I carry the Great Wall of China?” weighs more than the Great Wall of China.

You may ask: are questions things?

I would argue that they are not merely things – they are the most important things, they are things that carry the highest ponderance, the greatest weight.

If one peers into the etymological roots of the words – “question” and “thing” – and conflates their most archaic meanings the resultant translation might be something like “seeking the suitable.” Humans are creatures who constantly question the things surrounding them. Using the original meaning of these words, the previous sentence can be reinterpreted as follows:

Humans are creatures who constantly seek what is suitable.

This, for me, is one way to conceptualize wisdom: the act of seeking the most suitable path forward toward an ultimate end, given the existing circumstances. It is unclear whether other animals ask questions, humans, however, owing to their drive to question, possess the attribute of wisdom as a necessary consequence, and this wisdom is no feather in our hat. It is felt by the weight of the questions that we flounder to raise and carry!

The true weight of a question is revealed only when one wrestles with it. Just as the mass of the Great Wall of China is only felt if one attempts to dredge it out of the earth, the weight of a question is only experienced when one tries to raise it, to contend with it, to seek the suitable.

I began this reflection, by inquiring into what the heaviest thing in the world might be. If you lifted the question and hoisted it up in your mind before you scurried to Google it, you would have felt a flicker of psychological discomfort. That was your brain attempting to raise a heavy immaterial thing—the question. You were doing the work of seeking the most suitable response to the question given what you know. Search engines like Google offset our mental labour – they think for us, and consequently, we are forgetting how heavy our questions can become!

Google may be able to generate a list of heavy things on earth and beyond, but it buckles under the weight of questions that humans have borne for millennia:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Is there a God?

Is the universe truly a fair place?

Is there meaning in all of this?

These are heavy questions, under whose weight even the mighty Google shudders.

Here is another heavy question, and one that may have surfaced in your mind on reading what I have written thus far. You might ask:

Even if I grant, credulously, that weightless questions are the heaviest things, why concern myself with the heaviest questions (the ones that have proven to be intractable) at all? Why not be content with raising lighter questions that I can answer, like “What do I eat for breakfast?” “What show do I watch next?” “What should I wear to work today?” etc.

To that I say: imagine the primordial human – a caveperson who wandered but never wondered. If such humans never asked heavier questions – if their only concerns were breakfast, scenic landscapes, and fig leaves – we might still be wanderers and not wonderers.

There would be no idli, vada, sambar, and chutney. No Netflix. No Amazon Prime. And Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress? It would have been eaten not worn.

The reason I ask the heavier questions is not because it makes life easier – but because it makes me human.

By carrying the weight of these questions on my shoulders, I affirm a drive, that belongs, I believe, solely to our species—the drive to ask:

What is the heaviest thing in the world?

– Granville D. Austin