“we define our dialogue and, in a sense, our future through questions we choose to address. Asking the wrong questions puts us in the philosopher’s dilemma: we become the blind man looking in a dark room for a a black cat that is not there.”
So opens part one of Peter Block’s book The Answer to How is Yes.
This opening section Peter hammers away at how “how” is a deflector from acting. In other words it is an ego piece that prevents us, or allows us to hide behind acting. He says “choosing to act on ‘what matters’ is the choice to live a passionate existence, which is anything but controlled and predictable.” (p. 7)
He is interested in exploring how risk and adventure, which we all crave, we actually prefer to crave at a distance… and we keep distance by asking all sorts of questions that keep the pursuit impossibly at arms length. We like Man versus Wild on tv, we secretly hope we could do the same, and we verbalize if given the possibility we would…but really? Don’t we want to keep this stuff at a distance and isn’t that an illustration of how we feel about our deepest passions too?
He suggests the most common question we ask is ‘how?’ We as quickly as possible reduce the questions of purpose and meaning and passion and fire down to the practical considerations which in the grand scheme of things matter little if the passion, meaning and purpose are calling us forward. He gives six versions of the ‘hows’ we ask to keep acting at bay.
Do you ask how questions to stall risk engagment? What kind of how questions?
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