The Boy Who Asked Why Twice

My nephew, at four, went through a phase — as most four-year-olds do — of asking why about everything. Why is the sky blue. Why does soup steam. Why does the dog put his head on your knee. It is charming for the first hour and character-building for the second hour and by the third hour most adults are quietly plotting an escape.

What made him unusual, and what makes me still think about him a decade later, is that he asked why twice.

'Why is the sky blue?' Because the light from the sun scatters in the air. 'Why?' Because the small particles in the air bounce blue light around more than the other colours. 'Why?' Because blue light has a shorter wavelength. By this point I would be sweating. He would nod, satisfied for the moment, and move on.

His second why was not the same as his first. His first why was a child's opening move — half curiosity, half testing whether the adult would engage. His second why was the real question. The first why lets you get away with a slogan. The second why forces you to actually think.

I noticed, over that summer, that most of the adults around him could handle the first why and were flustered by the second. Not because we did not know the answer. Because we had never been asked to say the answer out loud. We had a comfortable half-understanding of the sky, of soup, of the dog. His second why exposed exactly where our real knowledge stopped and our confidence had been pretending.

I have used his trick, quietly, ever since. In meetings. In arguments. In conversations with myself. Someone says something that sounds true. I ask why. They give the standard answer. I ask why again. And nine times out of ten, the second why is where the interesting conversation begins — because the first answer was the one everyone had rehearsed, and the second answer is the one no one had actually thought through.

You can do this to your own beliefs. Pick one. Not a big one to start. Something small. 'I don't like mornings.' Why? 'Because I feel groggy.' Why? Now you have to think. Is it sleep? Is it a mismatch between when you wake and what you have to do? Is it that mornings, in your life, have always been the time when someone else was in charge of you? The second why is where the real question lives. And the real question is almost always the one that could actually change something.

The reason we grow out of asking why twice is not that we grow up. It is that we grow polite. We learn that the first answer is enough to keep the conversation moving. We learn that pushing further makes people uncomfortable, including ourselves. We learn to accept slogans about our own lives that we would never accept about the sky.

My nephew is fourteen now. He has become, mercifully, less relentless. But he still asks the second question, at least when he is with people he trusts. It is one of the things I love most about him.

If you have children in your life, do not train them out of it too quickly. And if you have not been asked a good second why in a while, try asking one on yourself. You will be surprised what falls over. You will be more surprised by what stays standing.