Where Are You Putting Your Energy?

By Rosie, Brazil, Fruitloop, South Africa and The Mayor, France.

Some questions make us stop and think. Others send us towards fortune tellers, forbidden soup and aliens building pyramids. At Lunch, apparently, both kinds are equally important.

The conversation started, as Lunch conversations often do, somewhere between ordinary life and mild chaos. Rosii arrived tired but cheerful after a demanding August filled with schools, exams and responsibilities. She had also recently attended a large training event with more than 500 teachers, where there had been speakers, discussions, new ideas and plenty to learn. More importantly, judging by her description, there had been a heroic quantity of food, tea, coffee and juice. The Mayor eventually had to ask her to change the subject because he was getting dangerously hungry.

Somewhere underneath all that busyness, however, Rosii had been carrying a question. Fruitloop asked what the most interesting question was that someone had asked her recently, and Rosii remembered one that had made her stop: Where are you putting your energy? Not only at work, but in your personal life, your relationships, your ordinary day—everywhere. “Where I put my energy,” she repeated. “Yes, a good question. And I need to think about this.” Sometimes, she explained, she simply goes on and on. Life moves, responsibilities arrive, and there is not always time to stop and ask why we are giving so much of ourselves to one thing and so little to another.

It was a small question, but it quietly became the thread running through the rest of the conversation. Where does our energy go? Into things we choose? Things we have to do? Other people’s expectations? Curiosity itself? Sometimes a question does not need to change your whole life to change something. It only needs to interrupt the day long enough to make you notice it.

The Mayor, meanwhile, could not immediately remember the most interesting question anyone had asked him. In fact, he began to suspect that nobody asked him enough questions at all. Then Fruitloop reminded him about Fruitloop University and the questions she had been asking him there. That changed everything. “You provided the most interesting questions and discussion topics of the entire week,” he announced. Fruitloop responded with a surprised “Oh, wow,” while the Mayor declared that this elevated her standing considerably and insisted that the fact had to go into the article. So here it is.

Fruitloop then asked what happens inside his head when somebody says, “Can I ask you a question?” Rosii chose curiosity. The Mayor chose terror. For him, the words sound less like an invitation and more like a warning siren. Somebody probably wants something. Perhaps something he cannot deliver. Perhaps something unpleasant is coming. His solution was beautifully simple: “Just ask the question.” If someone asks directly, he can think on his feet. Give him advance warning and his imagination has time to manufacture several disasters before the actual question even arrives.

Of course, once the Mayor started thinking about the phrase itself, language became fair game. Can you ask a question? Are you capable of it? Do you possess the necessary training, mindset and skills? By then, the poor person who only wanted to ask something simple might reasonably decide to leave. Yet underneath the joke was something more interesting. The Mayor realised that he is usually the one asking questions, so he turned Fruitloop’s question around and asked what it was like to be on the receiving end of his questioning. “Pleasant,” Fruitloop replied. “I’m not trying hard enough,” he decided.

He did admit, though, that he wished people would ask more questions. Too often he asks, “Do you have any questions?” and receives silence. Perhaps curiosity requires a little courage. Asking a question means admitting that there is something we do not know, and sometimes silence feels safer.

Not every question deserves such a long and productive life. Fruitloop has one she could happily retire: “What’s for dinner?” Rosii remembered two from an earlier period of her life. At one stage she worked in tourism during the day and taught at night, and people repeatedly asked why she had two jobs. They also wanted to know why she kept the same car for 25 years. Her answer was practical. Money meant choices. She could not have everything, so she chose what mattered more to her. A bigger, more expensive car or an apartment? She chose the apartment.

Looking back, Rosii was less interested in defending those choices than in wondering why other people had been so concerned about them in the first place. Her current response could probably be reduced to: take care of your own life. And strangely enough, that brought everyone back to the original question about energy. How much of our energy do we spend living the life we have chosen, and how much do we waste explaining those choices to everybody else?

Then Fruitloop brought out an imaginary envelope. Inside it, she explained, was the answer to one question about your future. Would you open it? Suddenly curiosity became much more complicated. Rosii thought of the familiar warning: be careful what you wish for. The Mayor remembered hearing a radio programme years ago about what humanity might be like if everyone knew exactly when they would die—the day, the month, the year and even the time. He recalled the idea that such certainty might damage our motivation. We know our lives are finite, but perhaps not knowing the date is part of what keeps us moving.

Would the Mayor open the envelope? He was tempted. Very tempted. But if it contained the answer to one of life’s enormous existential questions, he thought he would at least give resisting it his best shot. If, on the other hand, the envelope revealed that a five-course dinner would arrive on Saturday evening at eight o’clock, his philosophical resistance became considerably less convincing. Fruitloop thought it depended on the question she had chosen. If she had deliberately asked something about her future and the envelope genuinely contained the answer, curiosity would have something very specific to chase.

And that was when the Mayor decided the table needed a fortune teller. Would Fruitloop or Rosii ever visit somebody who read palms, cards, coffee grounds or crystal balls? Fruitloop did not hesitate. No. Not even for fun. Rosii was equally unconvinced. The Mayor then happily slipped into the role himself, imagining a fortune teller peering dramatically into Rosii’s future and announcing that she could see a fantastic future ahead—and the man of Rosii’s dreams arriving by lunchtime tomorrow.

Rosii still wasn’t buying it. “No, no, I don’t like this,” she said. The Mayor had never visited a fortune teller either, although his position came with several Mayor-shaped qualifications. It might depend on the price and the person sitting opposite him. And if she made a particularly magnificent prediction, he would probably ask to have it in writing so that he could sue her afterwards when it failed to happen. So much for surrendering peacefully to destiny.

For a few minutes, the table managed to be completely sceptical about fortune telling while thoroughly enjoying pretending to see into the future. Perhaps curiosity does not always require belief. Sometimes it is enough to play with a possibility, turn it around for a while and then put the crystal ball safely back in its cupboard.

The conversation became quieter when Rosii spoke about the sudden death of someone she knew. He had been 58, and she had seen him only a short time before. The experience had made her think about how rarely death enters ordinary conversation, even though we all know it is part of life. One day someone is there, saying hello, and then suddenly they are not. It was a sobering thought, especially after the discussion about knowing the future. Perhaps there are some answers we imagine we want until we consider what it would actually mean to have them.

Fruitloop sensed that the table had wandered into heavier territory and responded in the most Fruitloop way possible: she introduced soup. A stranger, she said, approaches you and whispers, “Whatever happens today, do not order the soup.” Then the stranger walks away. You had not been planning to order soup in the first place. Do you order it now?

Fruitloop absolutely would. She might not actually eat the soup, but she would order it because now she needed to know. Why had the stranger warned her? What was wrong with it? What kind of soup was it? What did this mysterious person know? Rosii was more cautious and leaned towards leaving the soup alone. The Mayor, meanwhile, required substantially more information before risking his imaginary lunch. Where were they? Had the warning happened inside the restaurant? Had the stranger personally suffered a terrible soup-related experience? Which soup was being discussed? What was the weather like?

On a freezing winter’s day, the Mayor admitted that he might take the risk. “No risk, no fun.” On a warmer day he might listen to the stranger and order something else. Eventually Rosii revealed that one of her favourite soups is cassava soup, and within minutes the Mayor was suggesting that the next time she made it, everyone could pop round. This is how Lunch conversations travel. One minute you are discussing mortality and whether humans should know their future; a few minutes later you are planning an international cassava-soup visit.

Fruitloop still had one more Fruitloopy problem waiting. Imagine accidentally discovering the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries, she said, only to discover that the answer is incredibly stupid. What mystery would you hope you had solved? The Mayor immediately thought of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything famously turns out to be 42. The joke leads to another problem: perhaps nobody properly understood the question in the first place.

The Mayor liked that thought. The outcome depends on the input. Ask a strange question and you might receive a strange answer. Ask the wrong question and perhaps even a perfectly correct answer becomes useless. Fruitloop, however, already had her own great mystery in mind: the pyramids. People have wondered for centuries how the pyramids of Egypt were built, so what would be the wonderfully stupid Fruitloopy solution to the mystery? “Aliens.”

The Mayor stopped. “You don’t believe that, do you?” Fruitloop quickly reassured him. “No, I don’t. Of course not. But that’s my Fruitloopy answer.” The Mayor was relieved. For a moment, apparently, he had been seriously worried. Unfortunately for him, once aliens had entered the conversation, they became surprisingly useful.

Earlier, Rosii had wondered how Fruitloop and the Mayor managed all the work involved in putting The Pineapple together. Suddenly the Mayor had the perfect explanation. Aliens. Little green helpers from Mars, Pluto or somewhere suitably distant had apparently been doing all the difficult work behind the scenes. “And a little bit of magic,” Fruitloop added. Mystery solved. Editorial productivity explained. No further investigation required.

By the end of Lunch, the conversation had wandered through energy, old cars, dinner, fear, curiosity, mortality, mysterious envelopes, fortune tellers, forbidden soup, Douglas Adams, pyramids and extraterrestrial magazine production. Yet Rosii’s first question was still sitting quietly underneath all of it: Where am I putting my energy?

Perhaps that is what a good question does. It does not always need an immediate answer or a dramatic revelation. Sometimes it simply interrupts us long enough to make us notice something. It can remind us why we made an old choice, expose something we have been avoiding, send us somewhere ridiculous or make us laugh at ourselves. It can even take three people from a serious conversation about the future to a debate about whether a suspicious bowl of soup is worth the risk.

We spend a great deal of time searching for answers, but perhaps answers are not always where the movement begins. Sometimes something changes because somebody asks a question good enough to stay with us after the conversation has moved on—and if the answer happens to involve aliens, cassava soup or a legally accountable fortune teller, Fruitloop University will presumably investigate further.