“For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” —CS Lewis

“Everything was once new,” said Little Brother from the backseat this morning on the way to school, in one of those slap-you-in-the-face moments of truth that only a child can provide, the simple profundity of a mind open to possibility.

Those children of mine–they say amazing things, and they ask too many questions. I am exhausted by their questions, particularly the ones they ask late at night and early in the morning or while we’re trying to get out the door, the questions they ask over each other and through the noise of daily life. Recently I asked (ha) an acquaintance if her kid also pummels her with constant queries. She thought about it and said, “No. Not really.”

How nice of him. But also, how sad. (Then again, maybe he just goes and grabs an encyclopaedia–or what we now call Google–to provide answers. If so, how really nice of him.) Because it’s only at this point in my life that I’m learning to appropriately value uncertainty, that I see how curiosity keeps us alive, and that it’s only through questions–not knowing it all, not having every answer, but questions, and the willingness to be unknowledgeable or just plain wrong–that we change and grow.

I guess some people don’t need to do either of those things, but I sure as hell do. And I’ve travelled the terrain from offended to amused when I find myself 180 nautical degrees (not a thing) from where I was on any given person, place, or issue. When Facebook reminds me of what now are my most Cringe-Worthy Moments, my Greatest Hits of Assholery from the past. It’s enough to make me wonder what I’m wrong about right now.

We took the kids to a show about stories at the Opera House recently, and while LB laughed his head off at every swear word uttered, The Kid sat beside me and whispered, “What is everyone laughing about?” The emcee had just delivered a very average joke and TK protested, “That wasn’t even funny.” I explained to him that sometimes people laugh to be polite and spare another person’s feelings. Confusion screwed up his face. “Polite laughter? That’s just dumb. If it’s not funny, don’t laugh.”

Words to live by. I watch his divergent brain try to make sense of a typical world and know that his curiosity about it all informs and richens my own experience; that his questions are a window into the much more of his processing differences. When we stop asking questions, or stop trying to find the answers to them? That’s when we’ve stopped growing. Stopped changing. Stopped becoming.

I read it a few days ago, someone writing that longing is a form of hope. Let that sit for a minute–I know I had to. Longing being the recognition that there is more than we can see, more than we know. That this more is not a threat, but an invitation. Curiosity is, I think, an engagement with longing, a grappling with what is beyond us. A refusal to circumscribe our lives around the smallness of what we know.

“There’s a shitload of things you don’t know, child,” says Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I want to say the same to my kids, to myself, but instead, in a moment of grace, it comes out as an encouragement to stay curious, which is to invite the longing in, wrestle and dance with it, end a swim in it and float there in the salty grace of it stretching out further than I could ever see.