What Are the Right Questions?

Why the Questions We Ask Now Will Shape the Future We Survive

This image features two outstretched hands, palms open and facing upward, gently cupping a large golden question mark that glows at the center. Radiating light beams surround the question mark, symbolizing illumination or insight. The background is a warm, textured blend of amber, ochre, and clay tones, creating a grounded and contemplative atmosphere. The image conveys a sense of care, curiosity, and reverence for inquiry.

As an educator, my first question is always this:
What are the right questions?

What questions guide us to the most helpful outcomes and bring about the most good?
What questions spark connection, joy, and action?
What questions lead us toward caring, collaborative, empowering, and life-giving choices, relationships, and pathways?
What questions result in the most growth?

The questions we ask shape the lives we lead. They determine the answers we find. That’s why it matters—deeply—that we ask questions steeped in authentic curiosity, questions that allow us to investigate and reflect into the unknown. To dignify experience. To humanize each other. To reveal what’s true, even when it's hard.

My early career was shaped in the field of experiential education, where the discovery model invited dynamic exploration—of ourselves, our groups, and what was possible in a given moment. For six years, I facilitated outdoor education, challenge courses, and reflective experiences with every kind of group you can imagine: sixth-grade campers, college basketball teams, firefighting crews, high school choirs. Mostly, I watched. I listened. I witnessed. I studied real time human dynamics.

We built trust, took risks, got stuck, got unstuck. And always, we debriefed. We reflected.

This cycle—do, reflect, do, reflect—was rooted in the work of John Dewey, but for me, it became more than theory. It became a way of life. I discovered I had a gift for the reflection part—for noticing what people weren’t saying, and asking questions to help them say it. Questions that unearthed meaning. That connected dots. That slowed us down enough to learn.

Now, I find myself returning to one question again and again:
What’s next?

Each day brings new heartbreak, especially for our littles—ICE intimidation in elementary schools, the starvation of Palestinian families, book bans targeting queer and BIPOC youth, the rising drumbeat of political fear campaigns. The noise is deafening. The grief is constant. Weaponized fear, amplified across headlines and algorithms, rattling our nervous systems like an orchestrated cacophony—a mass PsyOp shaping American consciousness.

The bombardment will only intensify as we approach the midterms. Even if a political shift offers brief reprieve, the deeper current of disinvestment and division will remain. Public education; Public health; Public trust—All in slow decay.

Health departments are crumbling. Rural hospitals are closing. School counselors are overloaded. Mental health clinics can’t keep up. The price of care—emotional, physical, and spiritual—is rising. The cost to feed our families is spiking. And the rich continue to grow richer, insulated by proximity to power, while everyday people pay the cost—in burnout, in breakdown, in burial.

And still—we survive. We grieve. We organize. We endure.

But what comes after survival?

What kind of future can be grown in the cracks of this collapse?
What principles shape our solidarity in survival?
What are we building beneath the noise?

These are not rhetorical questions. These are sacred ones.

I was profoundly moved by Jiang Yurong’s Harvard graduation speech—her vision of multilingual hope, global solidarity, and humanizing pluralism. In particular, her words “Sit with discomfort, listen deeply, and stay soft in hard times" impacted me deeply. It reminded me of why I do this work. Not because I have the answers, but because I believe in the sacred responsibility of asking the right questions—again and again.

So I return to my roots. To the challenge of reflection. To asking as a form of care. To wondering as an act of resistance. Because the right question invites connection. It dignifies the human experience. It makes space for shared humanity.

And so I ask, and I invite you to ask with me:

• What’s next?

• What are we leaving for our children to inherit?

• What truth is waiting to be named in your community, your classroom, your team?

I hope these questions help us stay human in inhumane times and affirm us as we keep building—quietly, courageously—in the dark, and in the light.

So:

What are the right questions for our moment in history?
And will we have the courage to ask them?