Cmo funciona el asombro
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
When I was a kid, so small
that I couldn’t reach the light key,
I thought that friendship meant Mateo,
my neighbor who lived
half a block from home.
We practically grew up together
and we never needed to “become friends”
because our friendship was
just another fact of nature.
Just like the sky is blue
or that what we heard
on the battery-powered radio
in the middle of the night in the woods
were signs of aliens
or astronauts in distress.
And for a long time, I thought
that there were no other people
out there besides Mateo
I could share my interests with.
When I started school, my classmates
would approach me at recess,
ask me a question,
I would answer them,
turn around, and keep doing my thing.
The school director, upon seeing this,
thought that I was running away
when people approached me.
But I didn’t do it on purpose.
At some point, I was approached
by the director,
who was also my mom,
and she explained to me that
sometimes people ask us questions
not so much because
they want to know the answer
but because they want to talk.
By then it was obvious
that there were a lot of things
that I didn’t understand how they worked.
For example, when my older neighbors
played hide-and-seek,
I would go and point one by one
where they had hidden.
They would get mad and complained,
and I explained that
if some of them had hidden,
and others were looking for them,
and I knew where they had hidden
why I couldn’t go
and tell them where they were,
solving this way the whole situation.
Or birthdays.
I would be carrying the gift
and, just before delivering it,
I would open it and explain
what it was about,
where we had bought it,
how much was its cost,
and whether or not it was on sale.
I would have a hard time
not going out to tell the world
every time I learned something new.
And in those situations
I would also realize
that sometimes the world becomes
too complex for some of us,
and maybe we don’t ask ourselves enough.
I’ve known for some time now that
when people explain
some social formula to me,
I can decompose it as if it were a thing
like anything we have around us,
with wires, and screws, and nuts.
Though, for example, how birthdays work
or how friendships work,
or how hide-and-seek works
are things that you can also understand
when we open them up.
That’s why it’s already some time
that to the question of
what I do for a living,
I reply that my work is to understand
how things work.
It’s quite a pretentious answer.
And some people think I’m doing this
because I’m a sort of expert on things,
with a peculiar ability
to understand how they work.
The truth is that if I do this
is because it’s really hard
for me to understand
what the heck goes on around me.
And that always made me feel
like some kind of freak.
Because I realized that not only
did I ask a lot of questions,
much more than the people around me,
but usually my questions
were different in nature.
And that’s how I learned that
when someone says “I’m starving”
you don’t have to call an ambulance.
Or that when someone tells us
that a relative died
it’s not cool to rejoice,
even if that person
is now going to have more free time.
And asking a lot of questions
I also realized that people
usually don’t wonder about
the most normal things,
of everyday issues.
For example, why do we greet
with a kiss or shake hands?
At least we used to do that.
Or, why sometimes people ask you
how are you doing
when they’re not interested
in our answer?
Or why do people
buy and carry bunches
of reproductive structures
typical from sperm plants –
flowers –
and give them to a person
who doesn’t feel right,
or as a way to seduce
the person they like?
And when you ask a lot of questions
you also realize
that sometimes people
don’t like them very much.
And some even get angry
maybe because they realize
that they had never thought
about certain things.
And there are others who get frustrated
because they realize
that maybe they didn’t know that much
or didn’t understand as they thought.
I don’t have a special trick
to ask myself a lot of questions.
All I do is pay attention
especially to the voice of my curiosity.
Which is that little voice that when
we are kids it pesters us with questions
and it’s the one that invites us
to ask “why?” every two questions.
And it’s the one that,
as we get older,
we get used to ignoring.
Sometimes, because we don’t find
who to ask questions to.
And sometimes because after asking a lot
the other person gets tired
and replies, “just because.”
And they send us to go play outside.
Let’s not forget that some people
manage to ignore their little voice
and continue with their lives
without ever getting up at 2 a.m.
to look up something on the Internet.
But for some other people
our voice is so insistent
that, if we try to silence it,
it yells and kicks all night
and doesn’t let us sleep.
The way I found to make peace
with the voice of my curiosity
it’s by just paying close attention to it.
And for three years and a half now
I don’t just go after my curiosity,
but I document it once a week.
Every Sunday morning
I send a newsletter
with a short text about
how something works.
And I search for what science,
philosophy, history or literature said
about something that called
my attention during the week.
For example, I wrote about
how pockets work.
Sometimes they’re just
a mere reflection of the way
in which misogyny or sexism
take the form of tiny pockets
that are useless.
Or how does it work
to have a secret identity.
That allows us to explain why sometimes
when we put on glasses or a hoodie,
or even a cape we feel
more confident with who we are.
It is also what explains
why nobody ever saw Batman and me
in the same place.
Or how does yawning work,
which is an involuntary behavior
that we bring in our evolutionary history
for a long time
and that practically connects us
with all the rest of the vertebrates
of planet Earth.
In other words,
it is the answer to the question
that no one ever made
about what do they have in common:
a lizard, a penguin and Brad Pitt?
And that’s how I already wrote
150 newsletters, maybe more.
But, what I like to write about the most
is about those
absolutely everyday things
that people don’t even think of
searching for any information.
Things like looking into each other eyes,
or giving a hug,
or giving a kiss
or taking someone you like by the hand.
Or starting a conversation
or even making new friends.
And for a long time, I thought
that everyone understood
how those things worked.
And that the day they explained it
I was homebound with chickenpox.
But now that I’m older and smarter
I realize that actually most people
don’t understand very well
how things work.
And not only that, but that many times
they don’t even ask questions.
Maybe, it gives them some allergy
to ask so many questions.
Or maybe it’s because we learned
that daydreaming and pursuing
our curiosity is wrong.
And that it’s better to know more
about fewer things
than knowing more about more things.
And I also learned that some people
just need a little nudge
to start asking themselves questions
and stop at the things that
got their attention during the week.
That said, it’s still
especially strange
to be here talking about curiosity
or asking ourselves a lot of questions.
Interestingly enough,
when I started writing
I did it because I was feeling
a little lonely.
Because it can be a little lonely
to ask ourselves a lot of questions
and try to look for those answers
and then want to share
them with the world.
But I found that we are
a lot of freaks
and that there are thousands
of people who read,
that when their curiosity
won’t let them sleep,
they invite it to a slumber party.
And none of this should sound new to us,
because, in fact,
asking ourselves questions
is how philosophy came to being,
and science or even poetry.
And it’s in search of the answers
in different disciplines
that we find nothing but poetry.
And someone could tell me,
well, all right,
but curiosity is useless.
Because if what you want
is to land a better job
or be awarded a scholarship or pass a test
what’s best is to focus
as much as possible,
and disperse as little as possible.
And that’s absolutely true.
But at the same time, if you see
where good ideas come from,
they come from putting things together
that were quite distant from each other,
from relating things
we couldn’t even think of,
and weren’t obvious either.
And that’s why
if we don’t ask ourselves questions
our world becomes smaller and smaller.
And that’s particularly tragic.
Especially since, also,
if we stop to think a while,
we are the only species to have
this ability to think about itself
and to think about itself
within the universe,
and to marvel in the answers.
That’s why in addition to all I said
we have some moral duty to feel wonder.
And in this eternal quest for
the things that catch our eye,
and also feel less alone,
maybe the answer lies
also in those instances
where at recess someone
approached me to ask a question
and I’d turn around and leave.
And maybe the answer is, in fact,
that when someone asks us something
we keep asking questions.
And the key may be just that:
To never stop asking questions.