Red Pill or Blue Pill?

“The one who asks the way does not get lost.” – African proverb

In your palm are two pills, the blue pill and the red pill; and you must swallow one. When you choose the blue pill, you will stick to your comforting delusions and biases and continue to live an average life. Swallowing the red pill however, will allow you to step inside the twenty first century and step out of your conservativeness and join the struggle with a commitment to design holistic solutions for a future for all of us. It will energise you to question everything you have heard or learned in your life. Today, you are being counselled to ask a lot of questions.
When you question, you are in effect telling the world that you do not know or understand something and would appreciate it if it could be explained to you. But more importantly, that you are willing to learn and if possible unlea
what you already know and relearn. Questions offer you a way of looking at yourself and understanding what your relationship is with the rest of the world.

Questioning is the adventurer’s best guide. It advises you on what the essential needs are. And in your peculiar case, it provides you with the exploratory device to draw out perceptions and assumptions of yourself and others. A lot of individuals think they can get by without questioning, without gaining insights into events and issues. If you are one of them, please reflect on what Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘if you expect to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, you expect what never was, and never will be.’

The truth is you cannot simply go about life without asking questions. Questioning is one of the most essential capabilities we have as humans to understand any and every situation – past, present and future. The concept of questioning is structured to connect yourself with others and your environment. And the answers you receive are to be treated as frameworks for action. By asking a question, you challenge yourself to actually undertake a course of action that will make a significant and sustainable difference in humanity’s quest for successful living.

Overall, I want you to inquire about your present attitude and link it to your desires and motives that are more deeply placed inside of you. You cannot discover yourself, your identity if you do not ask questions. You have just swallowed the red pill, so question the desires and wishes that invade and impose themselves on your thoughts. You will be surprised how much these questions can reveal about you and your uniqueness. You are a summation of your past actions, so an understanding of what defines you is essential. And when you understand yourself, it gives you a better understanding of your worldview which makes room for questioning your assumptions.

Questioning is vital to finding answers and solutions. It helps to diagnose and dissect problems and is the foundation for designing solutions. Questions promote movement towards understanding, by generating and producing insights into events, patterns and trends. It stimulates and precipitates reaction to change. And essentially, it lifts us beyond the humdrum, unto the stimulus path where we conjure solutions, eliciting and invoking the best out of ourselves, others and of nature.

Most adult have been held captive by fear of being touted as silly when they ask questions. Take a moment and cast your mind back to your childhood. If you cannot remember, take time off observe a child. Notice how many questions children ask. They practically question everything around them, and the more they learn the more they question. That is nature way of inculcating autonomy (interpretation) and uniqueness (perception) in each individual. As children, our questioning was driven by curiosity, by mystification, by doubt, by a desire to increase knowledge and understanding. Coincidentally, these same scenarios are faced by adults; unfortunately most adults simply refuse to question.

But you need to question to make sense of the world around us. Questions are imperative to understanding and cause our thinking to diverge and expand. You must question everything, including your long held beliefs and values and the way you do things. Questioning is a key processing tool of humanity, it invokes awareness and understanding and is one of the pillars of reasoning. You must always ask questions to harvest information, information you transform into knowledge, and knowledge you package as wisdom. Go on, ask a question now.