I always grew up with the idea that everything I knew was correct and this allowed me to create my morals and ethics of how I lived my life everyday. The more I thought about this idea, it questioned me to think how do I know that what I believe and grew up with is necessarily correct or even incorrect? While growing up I encountered many people that don’t follow the same beliefs I do, this began shifting my knowledge into creating this question in my head of balancing your beliefs with the other beliefs you encounter in life. Warren Berger is an American journalist, Berger emphasizes that questioning can lead us in many different directions and can be left unanswered, this allows us to create a beautiful question. Berger states that “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change”. The criteria of you creating your beautiful question should allow you to think deeply and not necessarily answer it, but shift you into creating more questions. This is how I created my beautiful question, which is “How do you balance the beliefs of your upbringing with new knowledge you learn as an adult?”
When I thought of this beautiful question I immediately thought about how my parents always grew up pushing things on to me but later on I came to college and starting questioning if what I grew up with my whole life was incorrect? This made my question my beliefs and morals, It made me think how do I know that what I believe is necessarily correct. My beautiful question allowed me to become open minded to different ideas, there are so many differences in this world, and it is so hard to balance what you believe when there is something different spoken about everyday.
I am a current student at Agnes Scott College, we are required to take a leadership course, and this course consists of the students having classes with instructors from many disciplines as a way to think about leadership from many different viewpoints.The professor of Asian/Chinese studies mentioned that when she arrived in the United States she had to accustom to the different norms that the United States had, that this later triggered her to change the things she would do when teaching. I thought to myself how crazy that was because we grow up learning things that we think is correct to later have this cultural exchange to completely change our way of living throughout actions. I related this to my beautiful question because I connected this to myself, I come from a very cultural household and I question things everyday, we believe things that we necessarily do not know what is correct or incorrect. I then later thought about when it comes to religion we had a professor from religious studies come and it made me think how do we then know our religion is the correct one? My beautiful question allowed me to create various routes of where my thinking went, which is what Berger looks for us to do.
This question could never necessarily be answered only thought about more because there is no correct or incorrect way to prove how we should or should not live our life. As much as we may want to stick to the things we grow up with we learn and encounter different things everyday.This allows us to be open minded with the differences in the world because we will never necessarily know what exactly is the correct and incorrect.
Berger, Warren. A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
