Primordial

The Why is a powerful question. It seeks the cause, the root of something. As we seek and learn the causalities around us, we come to understand the things in the world around us as meaningful and interconnected, instead of disparate phenomena which, when not understood, seem needless. Ignorance of interconnectedness also allows one to find weak cuts in the world around us - subsets of the world disconnected from the rest. And because they seem to be disconnected, one can habituate to divert the discomforts and the evils one sees in the world towards the other disconnected subsets - the pernicious habit of blame.

The Why itself, when followed, is the detective's search. Each new connection finds a deeper motive of the thing that is, and digs deeper into the nature of our life experience. And the deeper we know about our experience, the more power we have to change it, to maintain and update it, and to align it with our current needs. Often the deeper parts of our psyche, ignored, remain stale and forgotten. Seeking them is required to remember them.

When the graph of Why is followed, I wonder, does this graph have a root source? A primordial root, whence all phenomena arise? If so, it should be reachable from any node in the graph. The Why of matter, the Why of stars. The Why of society, the Why of hate. The Why of food, the Why of cars, the Why of blood, the Why of sex. The Why of resentment, the Why of light. The Why of pride, the Why of words, the Why of water, the Why of colors. The Why of walls, the Why of plants, the Why of nations. The Why of breath, the Why of time, the Why of song. the Why of ignorance, the Why of love. Why?

I think this is what children seek.