If you and I were sitting together and able to do this exercise in person – wouldn’t that be great? – I’d simply ask you to take a walk outside and bring me back three things. They could literally be three things you bring back into the room with you or they might just be something you see that you come back to tell me about. So you might bring me

What would I say to a friend here?

Let’s experiment with upwards counterfactuals first: set a timer for just one minute and write as many sentences as you can, as quickly as you can, starting with the words ‘If only…’. Don’t stop to think, don’t censor yourself, don’t consider anything as being too trivial or too painful.

One fun and effective inquiry experiment is to flip the familiar idea of brainstorming: instead of trying to come up with as many ideas for answers/solutions as possible, challenge yourself to come up with as many questions related to the topic you’re looking at as possible.

The explorer’s toolkit As well as equipping yourself metaphorically with the right mindset, there are some more literal items of equipment to assemble before you go adventuring, and some instructions to keep in mind.

As Walt Whitman so insouciantly put it: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).’7

Inquiry is simply the act of asking questions to which we don’t know the answer – or even questions to which we think we do know the answer, but which we’re open to reconsidering. It’s how curiosity expresses itself, and as we saw in Chapter 3, curiosity is at the heart of exploration.

Freewriting is simply writing whatever is in your head, without editing or censoring, as close as possible to the speed of thought.

What’s most interesting about this?