One question at the corner table

In a café near the canal in Port Said there is a man who has been arguing about the same question for as long as the waiters can remember.

It is not a big question to anyone else. Why do the young fishermen leave the trade their fathers kept? He has one theory this month and a different one the next. He tries each on whoever sits down with him, listens to the reply, and sometimes comes back the following week having dropped half of what he said.

Most people at the other tables are doing something different. They have opinions, and they are finished with them. An opinion is a question somebody stopped asking.

It is tempting to think the long, patient turning of one knotty problem belongs to professors. It does not. Anyone can choose a question and stay with it for a year: why one shop on the street is always full, why a friend keeps choosing the job that drains him, why a family that used to eat together no longer does.

The useful test is simple. What are you actually working on in your head at the moment? And what would it take for you to change your mind about it? If the honest answer to the second is nothing, then it is not thinking. It is a position being guarded.

The man in Port Said is rarely right, as far as anyone can tell. That is not the point of him. He is always near the edge of the thing he does not yet understand, which is the only place where a mind gets any real work done.