by Catherine Maven
Copyright © 1989
Once upon a time in a small village was born a baby girl. At
first, she seemed like a normal baby, even happier and more easy-going than most babies. The trouble really didn't begin
until the little girl learned to talk. While up until that time she had
appeared to be a normal child, and perhaps even intelligent, once she learned
the question "Why?" she seemed to lose touch with reality and retreat
into her own world.
For there were no other questions that she ever
asked once she'd learned to ask "Why?" And while it was amusing at the beginning, as
it is when all children start asking that question, it soon became apparent
that there was something seriously wrong with
this little girl.
People soon forgot her real
name and began calling her Why. She began to be treated as the Village Fool,
and that she appeared to be. Her
parents were in despair. For because she never asked the
question "What?" she never learned the proper name for anything, and
if you told her to go to bed, she wouldn't respond until you said "Sleep".
For in her poor demented mind, the WHY of bed was sleep, and so the word
"bed" never made sense to her.
So it was with everything
anyone tried to teach her. If you couldn’t explain WHY, the poor girl was
unable to learn anything you wanted her to learn. Of course, once she found out
that many books contained answers to WHY, it was easy for Why to learn the
alphabet, but she never saw any point in learning mathematics, history,
geography, or political science. And she was very disappointed to learn that
not only did most books contain nothing but nonsense, but that even the good,
interesting books that SEEMED to answer the question “Why?” often ended up
contradicting each other. So eventually, Why even gave up reading, and focused
on learning through experience.
Years passed. Why became a
woman, because even when we don’t understand it, our bodies turn us into adults
when it’s our season to do so. The trouble was, that as sweet and happy as Why
was, her siblings and neighbours, her teachers, and finally even her parents,
grew frustrated and angry at Why’s inability to think or act in a normal way. Just
as there had been no point in Why attending school because the teachers always
wanted her to learn things without explaining WHY she should learn them, Why’s
siblings and neighbours eventually lost patience with her because she refused
to obey rules that made no sense, whether it was in a board game or at a party.
Her poor parents were completely unable to make her obey them, other than when
there was physical danger involved. It was easy for Why to understand the WHY
of “Don’t run out on the street” but “Comb your hair” or “Be home by nine” were
beyond her ability to comprehend, and so she simply didn’t do these things
unless she decided they made sense. Without an education, it seemed that Why
would never get a job, let alone a good job, and finally, the village Elders
met with Why’s parents, her neighbours, her teachers, and her siblings, and
everyone agreed that Why would learn the answers to more of her questions if
they sent her out into the world. (Nobody mentioned how much more Peaceful the
village would be without her!)
When they told Why what they
had decided, and explained that the world was FULL of “experts” with MUCH
better answers to her questions than they had, Why willingly and happily packed
a small backpack, accepted the sum of money they gave her (out of guilt), and
boarded a train for the nearest big city.
You might think that a simple
girl like Why would quickly be victimized by worldlier and wilier people, but
you would be wrong. Somehow, every attempt to defraud Why of her money failed,
because she had no insecurity, ego or vanity to manipulate. And since she had
grown into a fairly large and sturdy woman, she seemed immune from physical
danger, and so Why was free to wander the world and ask her questions. When she
was hungry, she would ask people for food until someone said “Yes”. When she
was tired, she would either lie down where she was (if the weather was
agreeable) or else ask people for shelter until someone said “Yes”. Of course,
many people said “No” or even “No way!” to her requests, but she usually found
that asking “Why?” or “Why not?” would break down the barriers between her and
people she met, and that in addition to being given the food and shelter she
needed, she often ended up friends with those who had started out resisting her.
In her travels, Why learned
that the answer to her questions was more often than not the shrugged shoulders
of, "I don't know". But because it simply never occurred to her to
stop asking, she found that she was beginning to understand things that other
people obviously didn't. For instance, other people often asked questions like,
"Why does everything go wrong for me?" At first, Why mistakenly
thought they really wanted to know, and told them that things went wrong for
them because they expected them to or because they refused to see what was actually
going on until it was too late to change it. Why innocently thought that others
would be as glad as she to know things, and was shocked to find that instead of
gratitude, she was greeted with hostility. It took her quite a while to realize
that the WHY of this hostility was simply that these people actually knew she
was telling the truth, and even longer to accept that they were really not
interested in the truth, but merely wanted to receive sympathy for problems
they had created for themselves.
Nevertheless, Why loved to
listen, and watch, and learn. Even as an adult, she could be endlessly patient
in watching a bird catch insects, or a fox catch a mole, or a person fall in love.
She could see the WHY of each of these things if she only watched, or listened,
or waited. The necessity of eating was, of course, somewhat easier to
understand than the necessity of loving someone, but she eventually came to see
that the desire for love was in its own way a kind of hunger that people felt
that was no less driven than their hunger for food. She began to wonder WHY she
had never felt this particular need for acceptance and warmth from one
particular person instead of from everyone she met, but concluded that it was
something she would only understand once she herself had fallen in love. And
because she didn't have a schedule about when in her life this should happen,
she was content to continue to live and learn on her own as she always had.
When Why met new people, she couldn't,
of course, carry on a normal conversation about where she was from, where she
was going, or what she would do when she got there. She only knew that her
whole life centered around the question "Why?", and that where she
had been had answered some of her questions, and that where she was going, she hoped
would answer more. Over time, people seemed to become more accepting of her
disability, and she didn't see so many angry faces any more. The WHY to all of
this was quite beyond her understanding, except perhaps in that she was
beginning to meet more people like her. This was quite acceptable to her, of
course, since it made life ever so much nicer. When someone asked her WHY she
didn’t settle down and get a life, Why smiled her sunny smile and said, “I don’t
know, but I’m trying to find out.” When they asked her WHY she didn’t care
about money, or status, or security, Why smiled her sunny smile and said, “I
don’t know, but I’m trying to find out.”
After many years of
travelling, Why was surprised to find that people had come to know about her
and to expect her before her arrival. No longer was she faced with the blank
hostility of those who couldn't accept her simple belief in their hospitality. Instead,
she began to find a plate of food being offered to her before she had asked. People
would come to sit beside her as she ate, and all of them were asking "Why?"
And because this was, in fact, all she knew, she answered them simply and straightforwardly.
She discovered to her surprise that many of the things she had learned from
observation were mysteries to the people around her, and that some people were
actually desperate to know many of the same things that she had wondered about.
But now her problem seemed to
be that they didn't want her to leave, rather than annoyance that she had arrived.
To stay in one place would have meant a limitation to the answers available to
her inquiring mind, so Why gently refused people's offers of a permanent home,
and slipped away quietly into the night to continue on her way.
How far did Why travel? Why,
she crossed many seas, and spoke with many people. She found that there were,
in fact, a lot of people on Earth that cared as deeply as she for understanding,
and who helped her to comprehend the subtler mysteries of nature and human behaviour,
such as WHY people seemed to hurt themselves as they did, and WHY life had no
meaning for her outside of this one question.
And whereas Why had always
accepted herself as A Fool, she began to see that the disease of foolishness is
often a wonderful disease that frees one to live life according to what one
discovers as important.
And more and more, Why found
that the WHY of Why was in teaching others to ask this question fearlessly. To
ask until that empty wondering hole in you became a whole that was at ease with
the world and its inhabitants. And Why also found that the question WHY got
deeper and deeper as she aged. That from asking the WHY of Nature, she had
begun to ask the WHY of People. That from asking the WHY of People, she began
to ask the WHY of Life itself. And that strangely, the WHY of Life seemed to be
both a question and an answer for her, and she knew that, at last, she had come
home. Why's name had become a definition of her.
And this is WHY, to this day,
we honour people like her and call them
WISE.
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