on curiosity
monday musings: the world never runs out of things to discover if we allow ourselves to evolve
I hope your week is off to a very good start.
This weekend brought a mixed bag of weather - a gorgeous Saturday and a very windy and uncomfortable Sunday. We tried to perform three weeks worth of gardening in a day on Saturday, which never really works, but because save one summery day, April has been snowy and cold, we didn’t have a chance beforehand. Weather in Germany is often a crap shoot. It’s rarely consistently anything, even here in the southern part close to the Alps, which makes gardening a challenge. However, because the earth here in the Black Forest is so rich, the tease of growing things is ever present!
So we try, and try, and try again.
Today, I’m writing to you about curiosity, a subject I think and write about often, because my life has been dominated by its magic.
I had a lovely conversation today with someone about Italy. This person loves Italy so much that it hurts - but she is a doctor and lives here in Germany with her family and doesn’t see how she could make a huge transition like moving to Italy work. She had tears on the brim of her eyes. Her favourite place is Liguria, which is where a big piece of my heart is. We talked about walking on the promenade in Nervi outside of Genoa, about the colours of the sea and the city, about meandering down the tiny footpaths of the old city and hearing people call to each other. And the eternal beauty of the Ligurian Mediterranean.
And how different Liguria is to well behaved, orderly Rottweil.
I suggested she keep her eyes, ears and heart open, that things change and life has a way of opening new pathways when we least expect it. That I know this through experience. Staying open will mean that energy will come in, and when energy flows, anything can happen. Anything at all.
Stay open.
Stay connected.
Stay curious.
Curiosity killed the cat. Talk about a one-liner meant to give us a whopper of a limiting belief. The western world has created an entire macrosystem intended to keep us away from our own native curiosity.
Birth. Religion. Education. Work. Retirement. Death.
It’s the system that holds together the economy, and keeps things moving forward like an assembly line, until it’s our turn to fall off the end and into the bin. Goodbye boring world.
It’s odd this was what we aspire to, what we pay so much money to have, this sense of everything being decided, settled, carved in stone. Our genetic predisposition for safety hasn’t evolved past of our amygdala, shutting out the thought of change with adrenaline and cortisol and keeping everything the same.
The overriding desire and quest for safety helped us in the cave, or in mass immigration phases of history, or in times of war and poverty.
But many of us are fortunate enough not to be in those phases now.
Change always happens regardless, doesn't it, whether we welcome it or not? Embracing it seems to be the most logical choice; with that embrace comes the curiosity of what change will bring.
We bring ourselves to change and tell it, “make what you will of me, I’m here to elove.”
Who doesn’t want to evolve? It’s our natural state to do so. But with a system that places so much encumbrance for safety and certainty on our shoulders, it’s hard to bring forth the energy to actually be curious about life’s undiscovered possibilities.
Our lifestyle choices often work contrary to the natural evolution of our souls.
It’s ironic that sometimes it takes a huge crack - like a death, divorce, loss of a job - for a person to actually be able to break up with the system that has been holding her hostage without her knowledge in a safety illusion that was never real in the first place.
Being in a creative environment or with creative people forces me to think creatively, and challenges my knowledge and understanding of things I do. I need this - it’s critical to my overall health to keep stretching. It’s scary at times - because it brings on new possibilities, which means, you guessed it, uncertainty. It’s not always easy to live a creative life but I think the rewards outweigh the disadvantages.
The NIH describes curiosity this way:
Curiosity is such a basic component of our natures that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives. Consider, though, how much of our time we spend seeking and consuming information, whether listening to the news or music, browsing the internet, reading books or magazines, watching TV, movies, and sports, or otherwise engaging in activities not directly related to eating, reproduction, and basic survival. Our insatiable demand for information drives a much of the global economy and, on a micro-scale, motivates learning and drives patterns of foraging in animals. Its diminution is a symptom of depression, and its overexpression contributes to distractibility, a symptom of disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Curiosity is thought of as the noblest of human drives, and is just as often as it is denigrated as dangerous (as in the expression “curiosity killed the cat”). And despite its link with the most abstract human thoughts, some rudimentary forms of it can be observed even in the humble worm C. elegans.
Dr. Diane Hamilton, creator of the Curiosity Code Index, defines the factors limiting curiosity as FATE (Fear, Assumptions, Technology, Environment) 1
Fear
Based on testing, fear is the most predominant factor that influences our curiosity. It may be fear of the unknown, fear of what we might find, fear of the uncomfortable, or fear that the results of our exploration might challenge our current beliefs.
Fears are sometimes disguised as false bravado or ego. Fear of failure tends to be major. How many times have we threatened to quit our jobs or wanted to start a business fearing what will happen if it doesn’t work out?
Our curiosity rarely gets the chance to explore the options of a new job or how to start a new business before the dreaded “yeah, buts” shut it down. Our fear overtakes our courage and curiosity.
Assumptions
Another common reason we become averse to trying something new, or even wondering about it, is that we get comfortable doing things the way we’ve always done them, or we consider the issue already solved. If we assume something already works, why explore something new or different?
Technology
The third major factor that affects our curiosity is technology.
Technology has offered us so many answers and made it so much easier to access those answers, yet as generations become more and more technology dependent, curiosity can actually be squelched. If computers can answer our questions, we may not see the need to discover the why behind those answers.
Parental, family, teacher, and peer influence (our environment)
The fourth major category of factors that tend to suppress our curiosity is the environment in which we live or were raised. Social pressures can stifle our instincts to be curious.
Our families and friends might inadvertently put ideas in our heads that something isn’t appropriate or is even bad because they fear the unknown. Sometimes having a friend join you in a curious endeavor can help alleviate that tendency to judge.
How we embrace curiosity depends on whether or not we’re able to accept and embrace change. We indeed have the capacity to do amazing and complicated things if we allow ourselves to follow our own sense of curiosity to see where it lands us.
Curiousity as love
Opening to curiosity is opening to love. It’s giving the world a chance to have its way with us, instead of buying to the convoluted limiting belief that we’re actually in control. There’s so much connective tissue between curiosity and fear of the unknown, between our need for security and the fact that there really is no certainty, ever. It’s a line of fire that we either embrace and ignite, or run from.
How much do I allow myself to discover without scaring the hell out of myself for fear of losing what I have?
Sacrificing security for discovery and evolving is a very personal and deep decision that each of us must make. I do know this: the more we see what magic the world actually has to offer, the less scared we become of losing some of the concrete walls that have held us back so comfortably and numbly.
Now over to you:
Are you a curious person? What do you love about curiosity, and what scares you about following the path it could lead to?
Tell us in the comments!
What I’m reading on the stack:
This stunner about qi/chi energy from
Beautiful
and her thoughts on poetryWonderful
and her guide to pastaI’m continuing to stretch (literally) with writing master
- this week we wrote from the solar plexus in the embodied writing intensive. ‘s quinoa cereal recipe. It just hits the spot.A gorgeous essay on birds and mortality by
A very fitting article for this week’s Monday musings - Rediscover your Expansive Self from
What I’m doing:
I have a slew of things in process in the studio right now, and because many of them are heading to Italy with us, I am slam up against it! I’ll be showing some pieces on Thursday’s creative post that have made it out of the kiln.
We head for the garden shop this week - and how lucky are we to have this amazing 100% organic flower and vegetable plant nursery that’s open from February to November. It becomes Mecca for me in the spring.
What I’m cooking:
‘s quinoa cereal recipe. It just hits the spot.These to-die-for polpette (meatballs) in Swiss chard - tomato sauce from
https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/developing-curiosity/0/steps/156501
Couldn't agree more on the importance of curiosity. Being curious about ourselves, about the people we love, and about the world around us. I love that you touched on openness and connectedness, as I think being curious cultivates these states and as you said, facilitates evolution in a more flow state (instead of being forced into it!). For me, curiosity and courage are two of the most important character qualities one can have.
oh hey what an honor to find myself in here! Thank you so much, and can't wait to dig into this!! 🫶🏻