I wished more people started asking Questions....

A decade ago I used to be a very different person. Someone who made choices without any awareness of why I was doing what I was doing, someone who needed a lot of validation and the likes on social media, someone who needed to show the world I was better than somebody else I was competing with in my small world.

Then I met someone who told me that asking questions is the most important trait of a human being.

'Learn to ask the right questions' he said. 

'There are a thousand things we could be talking about right now. You can ask me about the brand of my shirt or about my beliefs about religion, success and fear. Which one would you choose?'

I said I can have a conversation about both these topics. I don't mind talking about your branded shirt if it is so much of a thing for you, or we can talk about your beliefs about whatever else you want.

'No..no...no..you don't understand. I am asking you to choose- why have shallow conversations when we can dive deeper , go more intellectual ? Are you scared of deeper conversations?' He asked. The usually very chatty me did not respond to this question for over 10 seconds, he asked again- ' I can see a little bit discomfort.'

'No No...' I said, 

' I can talk about everything and nothing.' I made up a very clever sounding sentence. 

'Okay then let's talk about nothing.' He smiled and looked into my eyes for a response. 

I did not break the eye contact and picked up my glass to take a sip of my drink...

In those days alcohol was my go to solution for all the problems! 

Being stupid and doing stupid things was socially accepted and loved,  and I did everything for acceptance and love!

After a while he raised his eyebrows as if saying, 'so?' ,

I understood 'nothing' stood for saying 'nothing' and kept mum. I believed my training in vipassana was more than enough for this minor challenge. 

I took another sip of my drink. 

He kept looking at me but said nothing for a long time.

This silence continued for almost 20 minutes.

I started feeling uncomfortable. 

I emptied my glass and kept looking back at him. 

'Hmmm' he finally said.

A smile of joy and victory spread across my drunken face. 

'So, this according to you is nothing?' he asked me.

I was still not in a mood to utter any syllabus...so I said, 'hmm mmm,'

' We surely did not say a word, but do you think there was really nothing in terms of communication between us during this timeframe? You see this Nothing has been a central topic in philosophy for centuries!' 

Man! This man was really not letting me simply be. He was making me think in ways I had not thought before. I was not a philosophy student , neither did I have any interest in it at that time. Why did I need to think about this nonsense! I hated 'thinking' . I was the 'Just Do it' girl! 

I was starting to get bored.

These are , I felt, the downsides of dating an older man! We simply could not connect. 

' There was definitely communication between us. 'Nothing' would mean that I should look down and not make any eye contact with you, like we did at Vipassana!' I finally started blurting out whatever I knew. I was out of patience, and when I was out of patience I would start doing and saying whatever the hell came to my mind without first letting it pass through any filters of - is this right? Will this earn me a brownie point? will this make me more likeable? 

And just like that I started having an actual conversation with him, on philosophy, on metaphysics. 

I was out of my comfort zone.

There were no right answers and wrong answers here. There were no judgements. Just two human beings laying themselves bare -intellectually. Willing to risk looking stupid, willing to acknowledge 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand'. 

Initially I could not imagine myself spending a few minutes with him , but here we were, spending an entire night together, exploring different kinds of questions. 

The answers were not important.

Sometimes they were,

but most of the times they weren't as important as the questions.

We played games around questions.

We asked all kinds of questions- the range was unimaginably wide. 

I learnt just before dawn that he was 64 years old . I had placed him at around 50 as he was very fit, an athelete. I was 28 at that time. My father was 58! So he was older than my father but he did not feel old. He felt eternal.

I was surprised that he could keep awake the whole night despite his age. 

It was funny how we ended up on this 'date'. We both shared a common friend and this common friend suggested we should spend an evening together, and we both had agreed.

The moment he saw me in the restaurant, he had rolled his eyes. He came to me and apologised. The common friend had not told both of us our age. We were both single and ready to mingle. Both of us had not mentioned any age related limitations. He asked me whether I wanted to leave, and that it was perfectly alright if I wanted to leave. But I had decided to stay. He asked me - ' Are you sure?' , and I had said yes, I came all the way over here, there must have been something why this friend told us to meet. So I want to know why. 

Early in the morning he dropped me back to my apartment. 

We kept in touch for years, somehow we couldn't meet again. 

But his questions and that conversation stayed with me for a long long time.