Originally published on readkindredspirits.com.

I’m one of those people who is particularly, nerdily, fond of chasing tendrils of curiosity down rabbit holes. I have an uncanny ability for sourcing information that other people might not find in places they don’t seek. I unleash it on any topic that catches my fancy (lately, it’s been technology, craft, furniture, literature, and internet linguistics). It checks out that my favourite way that someone has described me is: “There are esoteric corners of the internet that only she knows how to find”. 

But if there’s one thing I love more than going down rabbit holes, it’s finding them through questions. To me, the ability to articulate a curiosity, to shape a nascent feeling using words, sometimes feels like more of an achievement than finding the answer itself.

The textbook definition of a question is a sentence used to seek information. But it feels borderline criminal to reduce something as foundational as a question to something…transactional. We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered... Read the rest of the essay here.