the Question

It was an experiment in research design  that I used at the beginning of nearly every semester.

Usually, after a few class sessions, students had begun to feel comfortable enough with each other that we could jump into interactive learning, so I'd ask the students to group together according to their majors: kinesiology over here; performing arts over there; psychology in the middle; business and economics toward the back, etc.

After they were grouped I'd call for two volunteers to engage in role-play. Those two students stood at the front of the class as I coached them to have an escalating argument. We'd start with an affront of some sort and ramp up the play's dialog as best we could until the scene displayed some semblance of tension.

Then I'd tell one of them to pull out an imaginary gun and shoot the other dead: *Bang!* *Bang!* *Bang!*

Shocking? Definitely. But not as much as what followed.

After the students were sent back to join their respective groups, each group had what appeared to be a simple assignment to perform: Describe what happened.

That wouldn't be so difficult, except there was a caveat. The full assignment was: Describe what happened, using only the nomenclature  of your particular major.

Have you ever heard a human death described in economic terms? Frankly, it's pretty ugly: all about loss of potential earnings, human resource, wastage, etc.

Chemistry is even worse. There, it's all about oxidation, energy exchange, protein bondings... ugh. Physics? mass, energy, positive and negative acceleration, inertia, torque, gravity. Those groups couldn't even find the people that they were supposed to be talking about.

It was a bit easier for the psych and communications majors. At least they could talk about interactions between individuals, whereas the biology majors had to talk about organisms.

After we worked through all of the group descriptions, we'd come to "the Question":

"What's the most important thing that happened in the scene?"

The answer was fairly obvious:

Someone had been murdered.

"IF that's the most important thing, why didn't any of your groups talk about a murder in your descriptions?"

That answer was now plain to see: They couldn't. Why? Because there is no such thing as "murder" in physics, or chemistry, or music, and as long as you can only ask those specialized questions, you can never find one.

The exercise would end with this dictum:

The kind of question you ask pre-determines the kind of information you can find.

That's true of human growth, too. If your questions simply can't see certain ranges of well-being you may not be able to find some of the most important aspects of full living.

So, I pose the question to you: Can you find the robust life?