Asking the Important Questions in Life

In a village too small for war and too old for maps, there lived a man named Ian, who had long ago decided that peace wasn't found in the heavens, but in the soil.

He was the sort of man who startled no one and surprised everyone. He asked odd questions at market stalls—like whether carrots ever felt envy toward radishes, or how many onions it took to make a widow cry. Most people smiled, some rolled their eyes, and a few—mostly children and former poets—listened.

One chilly spring morning, Ian stood in his garden, staring at four tiny sticks poking from the earth.

“You’re mad,” said his neighbor, who leaned on his fence like it owed him something.

“Not mad. Precise,” said Ian, holding up a notebook. “Four plants. That’s all I need.”

“For what? A prayer?”

“For dinner. One meal. Four servings of peas.”

His neighbor squinted. “You need a field for that.”

Ian smiled, that quiet kind of smile that means I know something you don’t, and I’m oddly patient about it.

“No, just four plants. Each gives about twenty-five pods. Each pod gives seven peas. That’s one hundred seventy-five peas per plant. Multiply by four. Seven hundred peas, give or take. I need five hundred sixty for four people.”

His neighbor blinked like a man swatting away a fly that wasn’t there. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Because I asked,” said Ian. “And then I counted.”

He watered the soil with the tenderness of a father bathing a newborn. “It’s not about the peas. Not really. It’s about knowing what enough looks like. About asking: How much do I need to feed the people I love, without wasting what I can’t eat?”

“Doesn’t seem like much,” the neighbor muttered.

“Exactly,” Ian said.

A few weeks later, the peas came. Plump, green, perfect. He shelled them with reverence, boiled them lightly, and served them with a knob of butter, a touch of salt, and silence at the table. And in that silence, his children ate like royalty, and his wife smiled like a woman who’d just remembered why she married a madman.

And the neighbor, who never asked questions, stared at his empty yard and thought—maybe, just maybe—he’d plant four sticks next year.