Why a Word that I Say A Lot

Back in middle school, I was told something by a teacher I had it was one of the last things he taught our class. Now, this teacher was known throughout the school for being someone who didn’t go with the flow or follow any of the norms, especially at a private Roman Catholic school. He was young, vocal, and well-liked by the students. Most importantly he was willing to be brutally honest, regardless of who is within earshot of him and who he is talking to. Because of this, most students including me looked up to him, but then the last week of the first quarter of my 7th grade year the last week we had him for classes he told us a very important life lesson, in my opinion. No matter how important, stupid, ridiculous, or off-topic a question you ask is. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of life. In the end, we all are made of the ashes of stars and are just blobs of sentient space dust drifting on a massive spaceship called earth. Guaranteed to have the same fate as everyone else because in the end all matter is neither created nor destroyed it just changes form and we will just be recycled back into the ecosystem once we die.

With this in mind, I have learned to see all questions as both dumb and smart except one. Why a single word for me is the only question I ever get worried about asking because after a certain point no one will most likely ever know and the lack of knowledge accessible to humanity may be the answer, which is what scares me about it. It’s not a stupid question by any means because why is the question that causes all innovation in the world we might find something we don’t necessarily like or should have to find out and we may regret finding the answer. Any time I have to ask why something was done the way it was or why something happened or panned out the way it did, I always get concerned as to what the answer might turn up being because eventually asking why about anything you eventually get to the same point of we don’t know. For example, I and my grandfather both are really into airplanes, space, and rockets and when I was a preteen I was relatively smart and resourceful and so I was trying to figure out the best paper plane design, I could use to throw off a hill behind my house. So I asked my grandfather how planes work hoping for more ideas as to what shape I should make the wings he told me everything he could about aerodynamics and then he mentioned something. We don’t know why planes can stay in the air because we don’t know what exactly generates lift. We know that engines, motors, and jets propel a plane forward. But not how the physical force lift that keeps planes in the sky is generated, we only know designs to allow for the lift to be best used for a plane and the best way to go about designing new planes without knowing how lift is exactly generated.

Now when my grandfather told me this I was terrified, I didn’t necessarily get concerned to get on a plane for a flight or anything like that I love flying in a plane. The part that scared me so much about it was that after using planes for over 100 years we didn’t know how the force, lift works, and it still scares me a little. But in the end, it is one of the things that pushed me into the field of engineering, as well as keeping open a new topic that I love and can’t get boring to me. Since there is still a mystery as to why it works keeping me interested in planes as well as flight in general and just watching planes take off and land at airports. Because of it all, it gives me a sense of meaning to search out answers and solutions to problems and questions that need answering or have yet to even exist.

Featured image “plane | 7D” by Ben Harrington is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.