“What is your idea of happiness?” Aden Bedell asked.
His arms tapped rhythmically on the overstuffed red couch in his living room, one hand fiddling with the sock on a foot pulled across his knee. Since he sat down approximately two minutes ago, Bedell had not actually moved, but he was not settled in either. He had not asked my major, or where I am from or even what I like to do for fun. He just sat there, waiting.
Those who personally know Bedell — a sophomore cell and molecular biology major — describe him as a natural question asker, but this is a title Bedell is not sure he deserves.
“I guess I do ask a lot of questions,” Bedell said, shrugging.
He fidgeted under implied praise as if it was an ill-fitting sweater, which was a common recurrence in the conversation. It was apparent that he neither expects nor designs conversations to include himself, because Bedell does not ask questions that he has answers to.
“I don’t know,” Bedell said when asked what his answer is to the happiness question. “Is it purely biological? Is there something else going on, or is it something tied to the soul? I don’t know. If it was purely biological, then you could explain happiness by like, endorphins or serotonin or having a happy balance of chemicals, but I don’t know… if it’s more than that…I don’t know. Is it joy, like spiritual joy? Because there’s people who don’t have joy, but are happy and vice versa, right? So it’s not that.”
It may surprise Bedell to be called a natural question asker, but the moniker fits far better than he realizes. This is not because the questions that he asks guide a conversation naturally or that his question asking skills make him an interesting conversationalist — although they do and he is.
No, the moniker fits him perfectly because he never stops asking questions, even when he is trying to answer them.
The question of happiness is followed by inquiries of what I would change in my life if I could, whether I am a pessimist or an optimist and if my parents are optimistic. He did not ask about my history, or my family or my testimony — anything you might think you need to know about someone in order to get to know them. He did not ask “get to know you” questions.
“I could ask, like, ‘Why did you pick Union,’ and questions you’ve been asked a hundred times,” Bedell said. “But I didn’t want to go that route. I don’t know. I like getting to the bottom of things… I couldn’t do it any other way.”
His assertion that he cannot do “it” — getting to know people — any other way seems to be true, because when he was asked about the decor in his dorm, two hand painted banners from Homecoming and a Lambda Chi Alpha formal, his answers were short and casual, seemingly uninterested in diverting from the conversation at hand. He is casual even with the answers to his own questions.
He is never casual when he listens, his fingers still and posture settled.
Bedell’s method for getting to know people is unorthodox and risky, since for it to work, he needs the other person to be comfortable enough to reveal something true about themselves. But it does work, even if he does not get a lot of facts about someone he talks to. That is the point, since Bedell is not after surface level information.
This disinterest is refreshing and unsettling, because it defies a norm that is unconsciously and collectively accepted by most, that we must begin with asking about the basic facts of someone’s life before asking about their hopes, fears and struggles. Unfortunately, we forget to ask those questions later, left with only the rough sketch of a person.
Bedell refuses to get to know people that way.
He is after a kind of core knowledge, which is much harder to forget about someone than their name or their major. When he asks a question like “What is your idea of happiness?” Bedell is really asking two questions. First, he is asking about a concept that is thrown around and not clearly defined. Second, he is asking how your perspective about happiness reveals your nature and character. Bedell is not content with knowing the bare minimum about something, whether it is concepts like happiness or people he does not know.
“I have to know why,” Bedell said. “For instance, as you can see, I play guitar. When I got into it, there’s a lot of people who just kind of learn by ear, or whatever, and they memorize chords and shapes and whatnot, but it would always frustrate me…I would always have to know why. I didn’t know the music theory, I didn’t know like, why things sounded good. It wasn’t enough to just turn on a track and try melodies and whatnot and see what works. I like to know going into things what I am doing.”
It is entirely possible that Aden Bedell will forget my major or my school year. He may not remember my name after a while. But what he will know about me may be more important than any of those things.
