There is a streetlight on our corner that has not worked in two years. I had long stopped seeing it — the way you stop seeing a cracked tile or a gate that sticks. Walking home in the blue almost-dark one evening in her matric year, my daughter stopped underneath it, tipped her head back at the dead glass, and asked, "How long has this actually been off?" "Ages," I said, already three steps ahead, keys out, thinking about supper. She stood there a moment longer. Then she caught up, and I forgot the whole thing by the time we were inside.
Her school had set the matrics a year-long project, and while her friends were choosing topics off a list within a week, she kept saying the same maddening thing: "I don't have a question yet." It worried me — everyone else had started. It took me most of a term to understand that she wasn't stalling. She was hunting.
Here is something we get almost exactly backwards. We treat the answer as the hard part and the question as the easy part — the thing a teacher hands you so the real work can begin. Pick a topic, any topic, and get on with it. But finding a question genuinely worth your time — one that isn't already answered on the first page of a search, one whose ending you honestly don't know — is far rarer, and far harder, than answering it.
Anyone can answer a question they were handed. Finding the one worth a whole year is the real work.
A question like that asks everything of you at once. To even choose it well you have to look honestly at what's in front of you, notice what everyone else walks past, ask whether it can actually be investigated — and be willing, this is the hard part, to not already know the answer. A "question" you've secretly decided the answer to isn't a question at all; it's a conclusion wearing a costume. The point is to pick something you could genuinely be wrong about, and then bring every tool you own to finding out: evidence, other people's eyes, a nose for who benefits from the easy story, and the patience to change your mind.
This is worth being careful about, because it is easy to fake. A good question is not simply any question that sounds deep. "Why is everything so unfair?" will keep you busy for a year and teach you almost nothing, because there is no way to test it and nowhere it could ever land. The questions that repay a whole year are smaller and sharper — close enough to your own life that you actually care, narrow enough that evidence can reach them.
And you don't need a matric project to grow this. It's the same muscle whether the child is six or seventeen. When a young one stops and asks something about the ordinary world — why the taxi rank sits where it does, why the queue at the clinic moves the way it does, why two spazas on the same street charge different prices — the lazy move is to answer and walk on. The braver move, sometimes, is to say: I don't know. That's a good question. How could we find out? You're not withholding an answer. You're handing back the thing that was already theirs — the question — and treating it as worth keeping.
Which brings me back to the streetlight.
At the end of the year she stood up to present her project, and I already half-knew, with a lump in my throat, what it would be. It was the dead light on our corner. She had a year's work behind it now: who is actually responsible for a municipal streetlight, how many reports it takes and why nobody on our road had a fault number, who is most affected walking home in the dark, and what it would really take to get it fixed. Nobody had handed her that question. She had found it, standing in the almost-dark, asking about a thing I had trained myself not to see.
I had said "ages" and walked on. She had stopped, turned "ages" into a question, and turned that question into a year.
The summit question, it turns out, is always your own — a problem worth thinking hard about, all year, with every tool you have.
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