Our lives are implicitly or explicitly the prolonged pursuit of questions over time. As we deepen our understanding in a particular area we can tell our progress by the way our questions in that area deepen. In a way, we graduate or level up to more difficult questions.

There are books of questions and they are intended to stimulate curiosity and inspire and guide the reader to learn and reflect. I think those books are valuable. I maintain my own question book and this one is different.

It began as a blank notebook and I write the questions myself.

The questions you ask say a lot about you and what you are curious about. So this book reflects the progression of some of my questions and the things I am curious about over time.

If you have explicit interest in questions, this may work for you.

Question

It is simple. You note down the questions, as you come across them. Include enough context that the question will make sense to you when you sit down with it in the future. They can be what you want them to be. They are your question. They should be interesting or meaningful to you.

Answer

When it is calm, particularly when you are able to think clearly, sit with a question and face it, one at a time. I do this with pen and paper and sometimes electronically. The point is to focus, to dedicate time for paying attention and to capture it in a way that you can revisit it in the future.

You gain clarity about the subject of the question. Sometimes you learn about yourself.

More

Spending time with a question, examining it and responding to it will often lead you to more questions. Those might be simpler or adjacent questions that might need work before the original one can be properly answered. Or perhaps you came to a successful conclusion, which led you to deeper questions that you did not see before. You had to do this, before you could do that.

Again

Incidentally, it is not a bad idea to revisit some questions again and again. Though a question may be the same, you will not be. You can find something different in the seemingly familiar.

The questions are yours. The same is true for the learning that they can reveal. It is a personal experience.

Take your time with it.